Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:19:12 -0500, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
My recommendation -- when you are ready, switch wholly to D2. Don't
bother with compatibility, it's just not possible.
From what you wrote, it appears that most of the difficulties were in
dealing with strings. Might I suggest:
1. Replace all occurrences of char[] with string.
2. Compile to find every place that mutable strings are used.
3. Refactor the code to clearly encapsulate where mutable strings are
created and manipulated, and as the last step, cast them to string.
But string is not always what is desired. It depends on the library.
Right.
Tango uses mutable arrays everywhere because it prefers not to use the
heap as much as possible. For example, something might take a char[]
buffer, and a function may pass in a stack-allocated array for the
buffer. Changing this to string is useless.
That's where refactoring comes in. I haven't looked at the Tango code, but
there's a big difference between "using mutable arrays everywhere" and actually
needing to mutate them. Only the latter needs to be char[], and the boundaries
between the two are bridged with a .idup or a cast(string).
If Tango is relying on string literals to be char[], i.e. be mutable, this is a
serious bug and will cause seg faults. So, this issue must have already been
dealt with in Tango, and codifying string literal types as "string" rather than
"char[]" should not negatively impact it.
And lastly, if there are APIs in tango that accept char[] and leave the caller
perplexed about whether the API will mutate the string or not, that is something
that using string for the non-mutating ones nicely resolves.
