Using unsafe pointers have risks. Here is example wrong code:
var
s = @[1]
pi = s[0].addr
echo pi[]
s.add 2
s[0] = 100
echo pi[]
echo s[0]
Run
I think using indices instead of pointers is safer and almost as fast as
pointers. Pointer size is fixed (8bytes in 64bit CPU), but index can be 16 or
32 bits int as long as a number of points is smaller than 2^16 or 2^32.
I recommend you to write simple and working code first. If you write unsafe
code, you might spend a lot of time for debugging and give up the project
before you write correctly working code. Correctly working code is much better
than faster code that produces wrong result. When fast but unsafe code produced
output that looks like correct, how do you know whether it is actually correct
or not? It is not easy to write fastest code as modern CPU and compiler are
complex. Sometimes, I tried to write fastest code but it was slow. Data
structure that I thought slow was actually not so slow.
