> On Nov 10, 2016, at 9:31 AM, Joe Groff <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Nov 8, 2016, at 9:29 AM, John McCall <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> On Nov 8, 2016, at 7:44 AM, Joe Groff via swift-evolution >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> On Nov 7, 2016, at 3:55 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution >>>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> on Mon Nov 07 2016, John McCall <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>>>> On Nov 6, 2016, at 1:20 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution >>>>>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> Given that we're headed for ABI (and thus stdlib API) stability, I've >>>>>> been giving lots of thought to the bottom layer of our collection >>>>> >>>>>> abstraction and how it may limit our potential for efficiency. In >>>>>> particular, I want to keep the door open for optimizations that work on >>>>>> contiguous memory regions. Every cache-friendly data structure, even if >>>>>> it is not an array, contains contiguous memory regions over which >>>>>> operations can often be vectorized, that should define boundaries for >>>>>> parallelism, etc. Throughout Cocoa you can find patterns designed to >>>>>> exploit this fact when possible (NSFastEnumeration). Posix I/O bottoms >>>>>> out in readv/writev, and MPI datatypes essentially boil down to >>>>>> identifying the contiguous parts of data structures. My point is that >>>>>> this is an important class of optimization, with numerous real-world >>>>>> examples. >>>>>> >>>>>> If you think about what it means to build APIs for contiguous memory >>>>>> into abstractions like Sequence or Collection, at least without >>>>>> penalizing the lowest-level code, it means exposing UnsafeBufferPointers >>>>>> as a first-class part of the protocols, which is really >>>>>> unappealing... unless you consider that *borrowed* UnsafeBufferPointers >>>>>> can be made safe. >>>>>> >>>>>> [Well, it's slightly more complicated than that because >>>>>> UnsafeBufferPointer is designed to bypass bounds checking in release >>>>>> builds, and to ensure safety you'd need a BoundsCheckedBuffer—or >>>>>> something—that checks bounds unconditionally... but] the point remains >>>>>> that >>>>>> >>>>>> A thing that is unsafe when it's arbitrarily copied can become safe if >>>>>> you ensure that it's only borrowed (in accordance with well-understood >>>>>> lifetime rules). >>>>> >>>>> UnsafeBufferPointer today is a copyable type. Having a borrowed value >>>>> doesn't prevent you from making your own copy, which could then escape >>>>> the scope that was guaranteeing safety. >>>>> >>>>> This is fixable, of course, but it's a more significant change to the >>>>> type and how it would be used. >>>> >>>> It sounds like you're saying that, to get static safety benefits from >>>> ownership, we'll need a whole parallel universe of safe move-only >>>> types. Seems a cryin' shame. >>> >>> We've discussed the possibility of types being able to control their >>> "borrowed" representation. Even if this isn't something we generalize, >>> arrays and contiguous buffers might be important enough to the language >>> that your safe BufferPointer could be called 'borrowed ArraySlice<T>', with >>> the owner backreference optimized out of the borrowed representation. >>> Perhaps Array's own borrowed representation would benefit from acting like >>> a slice rather than a whole-buffer borrow too. >> >> The disadvantage of doing this is that it much more heavily penalizes the >> case where we actually do a copy from a borrowed reference — it becomes an >> actual array copy, not just a reference bump. > > Fair point, though the ArraySlice/Array dichotomy strikes me as already kind > of encouraging this—you might pass ArraySlices down into your algorithm, but > we encourage people to use Array at storage and API boundaries, forcing > copies.
Fair point. In practice, though, I think most algorithms won't need to "escape" that array slice. > From a philosophical perspective of making systems Swift feel like "the same > language" as Swift today, it feels better to me to try to express this as > making our high-level safe abstractions efficient rather than making our > low-level unsafe abstractions safe. Given our short-term goals for the borrow > model as I understand them, I don't think we can really make a > BufferPointer-like type safe in the way Dave is suggesting, since the pointer > fields *inside* the struct need to be first class lifetime-qualified rather > than the value of the struct itself. Since Array and ArraySlice already > communicate an ownership stake in the memory they reference, a borrowed Array > or ArraySlice value *would* safely and efficiently provide access to > contiguous memory with only support for first-order borrowed/consumed > property declarations and not full first class lifetime support. I agree. John. _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
