No, you can’t avoid the test as the area containing the length, the capacity and the items may not have been allocated yet, as in `var s: seq[int]`. You can’t return the address of something which doesn’t exist.
Now, I agree that if this area has been allocated, it would be possible to simply return something like `s[]+16` (considering `s` as a pointer). But, then there is a inconsistency as some sequences of length 0 (those non allocated) will return nil, while others (those empty) will return a non nil value. It would be better to return nil in both cases. And the problem was exactly the same when non allocated sequences and empty sequences were considered different. Before accessing the area containing the length, the capacity and the items, you had to check that the sequence was not nil. To get the address of the area containing the items without checking that `s` is not nil, the compiler should systematically create the area containing the length, the capacity and the (empty) item field. I suppose it would have simplified some things (no need for the runtime to check for nil when doing operations on sequence) at the price of a possibly useless allocation.
