On Aug 30, 2013, at 4:20 PM, Filip Pizlo <[email protected]> wrote:

> This is the kind of weirdness that I hope struct types *don't* have, if their 
> alleged purpose is to help people optimize their code.

This is a great point, thanks. On the one hand, I concluded long ago the 
exposure of the buffer seems like something we can't really avoid, since it's 
necessary for WebGL arrays-of-structs, which is a main use case. On the other 
hand, that doesn't necessarily mean we need the ability to overlay a struct 
type into random points in a buffer. We'd have to do this carefully, though: I 
believe we'd have to restrict overlaying to just the legacy typed array 
constructors, not to any new kinds of array types (since they may have structs 
nested inside them), in order to guarantee lack of aliasing. And then we'd want 
to make sure this covered the WebGL use cases.

> Now, I don't object to typed arrays having this behavior - it is what it is, 
> and it's certainly useful for doing graphics type stuff.  It's also 
> indispensable for emscripten.  And I'm OK with struct types also having this 
> behavior; in fact I would *expect them to have such behavior* if they're 
> supposed by help C-to-JS code generators or the like.

Not really for C-to-JS, no. I do want them to be useful for e.g. Java-to-JS 
code generators, but those shouldn't need the casting.

Dave

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