On Wednesday, 21 October 2015 at 18:38:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
A static array is of a fixed size, which almost no other
containers are. It also lives entirely on the stack, which
almost no other containers do. If there's a container that
lives entirely on the stack, then maybe it would make sense for
it to be a value type, but _very_ few containers fall in that
category, and all of the classic containers like vector, linked
list, map, etc. have no business being value types IMHO. It's
just error-prone. Heck, static arrays are quite error-prone
thanks to the fact that they convert to dynamic arrays, but
they do serve a purpose. So, maybe there are containers that
fall in the same category, but I expect that such containers
are pretty obviously value types and not reference types,
because their nature makes them that way. Regardless, I don't
see how it's reasonable in general to make a container be a
value type. It's just asking for trouble. If there's any
question at all whether a container should be a value type or a
reference type, IMHO, it should be a reference type.
I do find myself mixing up static and dynamic arrays...
I'll generally defer to you. I suppose within the context of
Andrei working on containers with std.allocator, then containers
that only live on the stack seems beyond the scope anyway.
Your statement just had struck me as weird as I had thought of
people like manu saying at various points that they only kept
data structures on the stack. My next thought was that static
arrays are usually on the stack and are value types. So I figured
that whatever the performance people are using were similar.
