On 6/11/2018 1:12 AM, Mike Franklin wrote:
On Monday, 11 June 2018 at 08:00:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Making it a template is not really necessary. The compiler knows if there is
the possibility of it throwing based on the type, it doesn't need to infer it.
There are other reasons to make it a template, though. For example, if it were
a template, it would not rely on `TypeInfo` and could then be used in
-betterC-like situations.
We have no design for this function that doesn't rely on the GC, and the GC
needs TypeInfo. This function is not usable with betterC with or without the
TypeInfo argument.
I think there might also be optimization opportunities using templates,
metaprogramming, and type introspection, that are not currently possible with
the current design.
Just making it a template doesn't automatically enable any of this.
So there are other reasons to pursue a template design for all of our runtime
hooks, and if our memcpy, memcmp, etc.. are also templated it't turtles all the
way down.
memcpy and memcmp are already handled specially by modern compilers, have been
for decades; I seriously doubt there's more oil in that well.
