On 10/29/21 1:58 PM, Paul Backus wrote:
On Friday, 29 October 2021 at 17:40:38 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote:
I want to have a pointer to a value in an associative array. Does AA
guarantee that the value will remain at the same address all the time
unless I remove the corresponding key? I couldn't find any guarantees
similar to C++ iterator invalidation in D Language Reference.
No, the AA does not guarantee that the value will remain in the same
location. Inserting or removing *any* keys could cause the AA to resize,
which may change the locations of all of its values.
However, you do not have to worry about undefined behavior, because the
garbage collector will keep the "stale" copy of the value alive as long
as you hold a pointer to it.
This is incorrect, the buckets are each heap allocated. Just the array
of bucket pointers would change.
In addition, AAs do not deallocate the key/value pairs ever. You are
safe to obtain a pointer to a value and it will stay there, even if you
remove the key.
-Steve
