On Saturday, May 25, 2013 00:33:10 Manu wrote: > Yeah, I've often wanted API's in that fashion too. > I wonder if it would be worth creating overloads of allocating functions > that receive an output buffer argument, rather than return an allocated > buffer... > Too messy?
We already have stuff like format vs formattedWrite where one allocates and the other takes an output range. We should adopt that practice in general. Where possible, it should probably be done with an overload of the function, but where that's not possible, we can simply create a new function with a similar name. Then any function which could allocate has the option of writing to an output range instead (which could be a delegate or an array or whatever) and avoid the allocation - though I'm not sure that arrays as output ranges currently handle running out of space very well, so we might need to figure something out there to properly deal with the case where there isn't enough room in the output range (arguably, output ranges need a bit of work in general though). Regardless, the main question with regards to messiness is whether we can get away with creating overloads for existing functions which allocate or whether we'd be forced to create new ones (possibly using a naming scheme similar to how we have InPlace, only which indicates that it takes an output range or doesn't allocate or whatever). - Jonathan M Davis
