Better formatting without allocations about joml HOT 7 CLOSED

Thanks for the improvement suggestions!

toString() is kinda an exception to this "no allocations" rule, which is also stated on the JOML readme above the paragraph that you quoted, for the following reasons:

• toString() should only be used for debugging purposes (which is also the case why they use a formatter, in order to nicely align the columns when printing them on stdout/stderr)
• a client should not rely on toString() in its "hot path"
• by design, Object.toString() always allocates a String (and additionally an implicit StringBuffer in all but the most trivial cases)

Especially because of the last point we have lost anyway, because we cannot completely get rid of allocations in toString(), and because of the other points I saw no point in trying to make it allocate "the least amount" of memory.

But I went with another version of toString() taking a NumberFormat as parameter, which allows a client to externally specify how numbers should be formatted. Regarding String.format, we cannot currently use this unless we give up on being 1.4 compatible.
And if we take a look at String.format()'s source in a >= 1.5 JDK, we see that it also allocates a Formatter.

The vector and quaternion toString() methods make no use of formatting, because they need no number layouting.

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Regarding your last statement, I don't think vectors and quaternions "need no number layouting". It is currently a pain comparing them in the console (where I print one object every line), because the values don't align. I think it would not be much work but very useful especially for debugging to also have toString(NumberFormat) methods for these classes.

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Thanks for your comment!
Please make a GitHub fork of JOML. There you can add any methods needed by you to it and afterwards make a GitHub Pull Request to have them included in the upstream.
Thanks!

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I've changed the formatting of the matrix values to really always align perfectly.
See: a69ab48 and 24ab853

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Looks a lot nicer now. However, the quaternions and AngleAxis4f still have the commas. Is this intended?

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I removed the commas in this pull request: #11.

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Closing this now, since with the advent of toString(NumberFormat), the client is now able to specify the format which avoids that allocation.

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