== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu ([email protected])'s article > Yes, it will be because the book has a few failing unittests. In fact, I > was hoping I could talk you or David into doing it :o). > Andrei
Unfortunately, I've come to hate the MRU idea because it would fail miserably for large arrays. I've explained this before, but not particularly thoroughly, so I'll try to explain it more thoroughly here. Let's say you have an array that takes up more than half of the total memory you are using. You try to append to it and: 1. The GC runs. The MRU cache is therefore cleared. 2. Your append succeeds, but the array is reallocated. 3. You try to append again. Now, because you have a huge piece of garbage that you just created by reallocating on the last append, the GC needs to run again. The MRU cache is cleared again. 4. Goto 2. Basically, for really huge arrays, we will have the nasty surprise that arrays are reallocated almost every time. Unless something can be done about this, my vote is as follows: 1. a ~= b -> syntactic sugar for a = a ~ b. It's inefficient, but at least it's predictably inefficient and people won't use it if they care at all about performance. 2. .length always reallocates when increasing the length of the array. 3. Get a library type with identical syntax to slices that truly owns its contents and supports efficient appending, resizing, etc. I'd be willing to write this (and even write it soon) if noone else wants to, especially since I think we might be able to use it to define unique ownership for arrays to allow essentially a safe assumeUnique for arrays and kill two birds w/ one stone.
