On Wednesday, 14 May 2025 at 03:36:40 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
to!string definitely deals with null-terminated strings, or it
wouldn't work at all. It's not the kind of thing that would
work by accident.
I don't think it's good API design:
Pointer to string conversions convert the pointer to a size_t
value. If pointer is char*, treat it as C-style strings. In
that case, this function is @system.
So `to!string` is bad for generic code. Want to represent the
address of a byte* as hex in a string, fine. Oh now the pointer's
element type is char - wait, why isn't the result hex any more?
I really dislike overloads having different behaviour like this
and it would be nice if Phobos 3 could take a much stricter
stance on that.
On the docs:
This special behaviour is buried as *part* of a single bullet
point in long documentation that is not easy to find. (And
there's currently no anchor link for that section - each
'Examples:' section should probably have one).
