On Friday, 12 April 2013 at 07:04:23 UTC, Manu wrote:
string[string] is used in the main API to receive environment
variables;
perhaps kinda convenient, but it's impossible to supply
environment
variables with loads of allocations.
Environment variables are a mapping of strings to strings. The
natural way to express such a mapping in D is with a
string[string]. It shouldn't be necessary to allocate an AA
literal, though.
toStringz is used liberally; alternatively, alloca() could
allocate the
c-string's on the stack and zero terminate them there, passing
a pointer to
the stack string to the OS functions.
It is kind of hard to use alloca() in a safe manner in D, because
DMD will happily inline functions that use it. The following
program will overflow the stack if compiled with -inline:
void doStuff()
{
auto p = alloca(100);
}
void main()
{
foreach (i; 0 .. 1_000_000) doStuff();
}
This is of course fixable, but until that happens, I would
consider alloca() a no-go for Phobos.
