When I see you say “any brand of FIFO loses” in the same post as “what you need is a ring buffer”, it shows that there’s a terminology disconnect here: A “ring buffer” used for streaming data is a brand of ”FIFO” :)

Therefore, the implementation you’re suggesting is actually not all that different from my current solution, except for a few important details related to the particular problem I’m solving — e.g. handling many parallel streams which may momentarily drift out of sync (where those that are not delayed must still be processed without the state of other streams interfering to add latency), among other important details.

Ultimately though, aside from this discussion on high performance designs (which though fun, would not work without you actually knowing the requirements of what I’m working on — e.g. it’s not HFT), I’m just glad we’re in agreement that there are applications where avoiding dynamic allocations is absolutely essential, and that it would be a huge mistake to add them to a high-performance language’s most fundamental integer types.