Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Sun, 31 May 2009 22:41:47 +0300, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
I don't know why it was decided to mark the contents of void[] as
"might have pointers". It makes no sense! Consider:
[...]
3) It's very rare in practice that the only pointer to your
object (which you still plan to access later) to be stored in a
void[]-allocated array!
Rare or common, it still would be a nasty bug lurking to catch
someone. The default behavior in D should be to be correct code.
Doing potentially unsafe things to improve performance should
require extra effort - in this case it would be either using the gc
function to mark the memory as not containing pointers, or storing
them as ubyte[] instead.
This isn't about performance, this is about having one thousand casts
all over my code. It becomes a burden to cast everything to ubyte[]
when working with abstract binary data. For example, when building a
MIME multipart message with binary fields, every line needs to have a
cast in it - when we could have just used the ~= operator to append
to a void[].
Another alternative would be to allow implicitly casting arrays of any
type to const(ubyte)[] which is always safe. But I think this is too
much ado about nothing - you're avoiding the type system to start with,
so use ubyte, insert a cast, and call it a day. If you have too many
casts, the problem is most likely elsewhere so that argument I'm not buying.
Andrei
