> On Dec 20, 2016, at 9:14 AM, Sergo Bero via swift-dev <swift-dev@swift.org> > wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I have a question about Swift Structs, regarding memory usage... > as WWDC talk ( Session 416 ) says, Swift uses heap memory to store large > values ( contain more than 3 words as current inline buffer is 3 words ), > has something changed in this area since WWDC? > What are the advantages from copying it to heap? > is current behaviour final and will it be “baked” into Swift ABI? > is it possible to tell compiler ( or force ) to always use stack for value > types ?
Structs are currently always allocated "inline" in their container. So if the struct is the type of a struct property, the outer struct will include enough space for the inner struct; if the struct is the type of a class property, the class's instance size will include enough space for the struct; and if the struct is the type of a local variable, there will generally be that many bytes allocated in the stack frame. There are two exceptions to that, both relating to situations where an arbitrarily-sized type needs to be fit into something fixed-size. In generic code, we don't know how large an unconstrained type argument will take up, so if a function that's generic over some type T has a local variable of type T, we have to allocate space for that somehow. Today, that's done by allocating an inline buffer of 3 words and then using malloc if it spills over that. But we're exploring using dynamic stack allocations instead, like C's alloca() function; if that works out, we'll eliminate of the two cases. The other case comes up with protocol types. A protocol type inherently has to have *some* fixed size, so it's an unavoidable limitation that *some* types will need to be allocated out-of-line when stored into a protocol value. John. _______________________________________________ swift-dev mailing list swift-dev@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-dev
