On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Jack Moffitt <j...@metajack.im> wrote:
> In the latest Rust upgrade for Servo, I noticed that the path API is
> now mutate-in-place instead of return a new path. It used to be that
> path.push("foo") gave you a new path with an extra component, but now
> path.push("foo") returns () and mutates the path in place.
>
> I liked the old API better. I realize this is probably more consistent
> with std::vec, and consistency is good. I thought I'd bring this up to
> see what other people thought as a lot of the APIs are getting
> rewritten lately and I haven't seen any concrete guidelines on what
> they should be.
>
> If we decide that both API styles are good to have, what should the
> naming convention be for the functional vs. mutable ones? Ruby,
> Scheme, and Clojure use `!` to denote the in-place mutation ones, but
> that syntax is for macros in rust.
>
> jack.
>
I think an immutable version should only be exposed if it's as efficient as
operating in-place. For containers, I really don't want to have APIs that
exist only to make allocating a whole new container and copying over more
convenient. It's harder to write efficient code when inefficient code looks
more idiomatic.
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