On Thursday, 8 May 2014 at 17:46:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
A discussion is building around
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/2149,
which is a nice initiative by Walter to allow Phobos users to
avoid or control memory allocation.
First instance of the pull request copied the inputs into an
output range.
The second instance (right now) creates an input range that
lazily creates the result. The element type of that range is
the encoding type of the first argument (i.e. char or wchar
most of the time). This is different from string/wstring/etc
element-wise iteration because it'll be done code unit-wise,
not code point-wise.
I'm with H. S. Teoh that we should prefer the input range
approach. My limited experience with output ranges suggests to me
that they really need to be the end point, where the data is
actually leaving the program (writing to disk, over a network).
And as Teoh mentions, if you need it in specific memory you can
copy an input range into it.
D is already fairly lazy, and .array() is great for doing eager
evaluation into the GC. For strings having something similar
which allows for the original encoding to remain would be good.
