On 29-Jul-12 12:55, Era Scarecrow wrote:
On Sunday, 29 July 2012 at 06:27:32 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
Thus BitArray either becomes value type (that may come as unexpected,
see your option c/d). Or it becomes full reference type as in option a
(though it sucks). Sorry but b is no go, as it makes code
unpredictable I'd rather take my idea with separate ranges then b.
I've had a thought. Why not make it fully reference and at the same
time not? Consider making a slice which is the real BitArray, then you
have an outer container that when you want value semantics you use it
and it would make appropriate copies every time it needed to (including
when first put in the container). It would be implicitly convertible to
a slice. So...
BitArraySlice {
//real bitarray stuff and pointer ref
}
BitArray { //value semantics wrapper?
BitArraySlice ba;
alias ba this;
//include wrapper versions of binary operators
this(this) {
}
}
Doing it this way the arguments being passed as reference slices would
ensure unneeded copies wouldn't be made. On the other hand a smaller
portion of the code would need to be updated. Along with that a slice
could be set as COW allowing quite a bit of flexibility.
Thoughts?
Hm... and small array optimizations go where? BitArraySlice won't be a
full reference type if it does it.
--
Dmitry Olshansky
