When doing manual memory management in Nim, I often find myself having to
define two versions of a proc - one that takes a `var` parameter and one that
takes a `ptr` parameter.
Otherwise I will run into issues like this:
var m: ptr Monster
var b: Bullet
proc chooseAnim(m: var Monster) =
# some logic to set the current animation
# ...
proc update(b: ptr Bullet) =
# move the bullet and check for collisions
# ...
m.chooseAnim() # uh oh!
m[].chooseAnim() # better.
b.update() # uh oh!
(addr b).update() # better.
Run
I was happy to discover that [{.experimental:
"implicitDeref".}](https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#types-reference-and-pointer-types)
is a thing, which pretty much fixes all my problems! If I define the `var`
version of the procedure, I don't need to define the `ptr` version anymore.
But I suppose I can't start doing this in library code yet, because then I'd be
forcing other people to use this experimental pragma in their code, or to have
to worry about addressing/dereferencing their stuff to make the library
functions happy.
So I was wondering, what's the future of this feature? Do we know yet if it's
here to stay? Does it have any caveats that I should know about?
Thanks :)
