* asynchronous pipelining 
  (currently being developed in branch parallel_pipelining_integration)

* replace build system, something with '$LIBNAME-config --libs --cflags ...' would be nice

* if the stxxl disk files have been enlarged because more external memory
  was requested by the program, resize them afterwards to
  max(size_at_program_start, configured_size)
  https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4925158

* integrate unordered_map branch

* allocation strategies: provide a method get_num_disks()
  and don't use stxxl::config::get_instance()->disks_number() inappropriately

* implement recursion in stable_ksort and do not assume random key
  distribution, do sampling instead
  as a start, at least abort early if the expected size of a bucket is larger
  than the memory available to sort it

* debug stable_ksort in depth, there are still some crashing cases left

* continue using the new approach for STXXL_VERBOSE:
  $(CXX) -DSTXXL_VERBOSE_FOO=STXXL_VERBOSEx

* check+fix all sorted_runs() calls to not cause write I/Os

* on disk destruction, check whether all blocks had been deallocated before,
  i.e. free_bytes == disk_size

* implement an allocator which looks at the available free space on disks
  when distributing blocks to disks, or does load-balancing depending
  on the given speed of the disks

* implement new disk queuing strategy that supports NCQ,
  which is now widely available in HDDs/SSDs; 
  probably most interesting for rather small block sizes 
  (currently begin developed in branch kernelaio)

* allow configuration of the block-managed disks using API calls, 
  not only through the configuration file.

* separate library sources and tests/benchmarks
  (e. g. to top level directories src/ and tests/)

* abstract away block manager so every container can attach to a file.

* overhead: stream::sorted_runs (which may be rather big) is copied into stream_runs_merger

* overhead: stream::sorted_runs is copy-initialized from locally created runs

* retry incomplete I/Os for all file types (currently only syscall)

* iostats: add support for splitting I/Os and truncating reads at EOF

* do not specify marginal properties such as allocation strategy as part of the template type.
  instead, make such properties dynamically configurable using run-time polymorphism, 
  which would incur only a negligible running time overhead (one virtual function call per block).