Is there a detailed rationale for this somewhere? Making typical applications pay the cost here for a specific security scenario seems really bizarre to me. Clearing standard library data structures is an incredibly common operation. If you want to ensure that someone can't clear the map/set, shouldn't you be handing them an encapsulated version of the data structure? This seems like a corner case that shouldn't justify removing an important primitive.
If you have a clear method, the security problem seems solved by wrapping it in an object or using a proxy to deny the ability to clear (you hide the actual map/set, so it can't be cleared - you expose only the operations you want to expose). If you don't have a clear method, anyone wanting to clear the data structure has to throw it away and allocate a new one. This has significant disadvantages: The new structure starts empty at a default size, so repopulating it will have to grow the buffer multiple times - this is undesirable for cases where you are reusing a single data structure to store state for a long-running application. The allocation adds to GC and memory pressure for a long-running application that needs to clear data structures frequently. Were it a lightweight data type this would matter less, but a typical map instance with data in it can occupy a considerable amount of space in the heap. Being able to clear the structure now requires that all consumers have support for replacing their reference(s) to the old map with the new one. This makes it harder to maintain encapsulation because you may have saved a reference to the map in a private property or within a closure. Now you need to add accessibility points to everything that might retain the map so that you can update the reference. Or, you have to encapsulate maps and sets just to recreate the clear operation that should have been there to begin with. In either case, encapsulation or shielding the container behind a proxy is necessary. I insist that the common case is the one that shouldn't have to encapsulate, because optimizing for that case will benefit the vast majority of web applications that use it and the penalty to security-sensitive cases is small. -kg _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
