On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 16:32:24 -0400, monarch_dodra <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Thursday, 5 June 2014 at 19:57:08 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
A possible fix could be to reject the call to ptr at runtime if the
slice is empty.
I don't know why you'd ever do "arr.ptr" in the first place, other than
to avoid the bounds check. So I think the call should just be unsafe,
and we call it a day. Or maybe to interface with a function that want a
pointer?
That's true. You can always get a pointer to any valid element with
&arr[x]. Then at least you have bounds checking to save you.
In fact, in safe code, arr.ptr could be replaced with &arr[0].
"Maybe", we could get away with allowing "&arr[someIndex]" though. The
compiler would have to be able to "understand" this is not escaping a
reference (for *DYNAMIC* arrays anyways).
If we are going to allow pointers, we need to allow pointers to data we
know is valid and heap-allocated. This should include dynamic array
elements.
-Steve
