Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, January 13, 2012 12:17:06 Piotr Szturmaj wrote:
Is there a plan to replace streams with byte ranges? Or should I just
use streams?
At some point, std.stream will be replace with a range-based API. There has
been some discussion on the design, but it hasn't been fully fleshed out, let
alone implemented yet.
I need to do some binary parsing and I found using ranges is not very
comfortable. For example to read an uint I need to:
version (LittleEndian)
auto r = retro(takeExactly(range, 4));
else
auto r = takeExactly(range, 4);
uint u;
auto ar = (cast(ubyte*)&u)[0 .. 4];
replaceInPlace(ar, 0, 4, r);
while with streams its easier:
uint u;
stream.read(u);
version (LittleEndian)
u = swapEndian(u);
Just because it's a range doesn't mean that there won't be a function allowing
you to do something something more like
auto val = read!int(range);
That sort of thing will have to be discussed and sorted out when the stream
API is overhauled. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that seems to be
forever on the TODO list.
Thanks for clarifying this. Btw. I find those endian conversions little
uncomfortable. I'm talking about:
version(LittleEndian) swapEndian()
instead of directly calling bigEndianToNative() on uint. I know ubyte[4]
param is to avoid mistakes, but I think most of the time programmers
know what they do, so IMHO these preventions are unnecessary if we
convert integers only. I would leave ubyte[4] params as they are and
create overloads for integers using regular int params.
