On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 07:01:07 -0700, moritz wrote: > On Mon Oct 20 06:54:16 2014, abraxxa wrote: > > As discussed on IRC mainly with moritz I'd need a way to get the > > number of bytes, not elements, of a Buf object so it can be looped > > and > > each byte accessed with $buf.[$idx]. > > I'm requiring this in DBDish::Oracle for passing UTF-16 encoded > > values > > and their byte-length to the OCI C library using NativeCall. > > Another use case: cryptography, which typically works on the byte > level, even for multi-byte encodings.
A lot of time has passed and we have has the first part for quite some time. $ perl6 -e '.bytes.say for buf8.new(1,2,3), buf16.new(1,2,3), buf32.new(1,2,3), buf64.new(1,2,3)' 3 6 12 24 ...which is both specced and already tested. Also as a Container type you get .of: $ perl6 -e '.of.say for Buf[int8].new(1,2,3), Buf[uint16].new(1,2,3), Buf[int32], Buf[uint64]' (int8) (uint16) (int32) (uint64) ...and the native types can be nativesizeof'd $ perl6 -e 'use NativeCall; nativesizeof(.of).say for Buf[int8].new(1,2,3), Buf[uint16].new(1,2,3), Buf[int32], Buf[uint64]' 1 2 4 8 Also there are ways to finagle the second need with NativeCall: $ perl6 -e 'use NativeCall; my $b16 = buf16.new(1,2,3); my $b8 = nativecast(CArray[uint8], $b16); $b8[^6].say' (1 0 2 0 3 0) ...though internally this relies on some GC manipulations and the details on exactly if/when it becomes fragile aren't documented. Granted a lot more could be done to make this, and endianness conversions easier, e.g. safe and optimized indexing adverbs like buf32.new(1,2)[^8]:swab8 might be nice, as well as having types that carry their endianness information around with them, but I think that falls in the 6.d-and-later design discussion category rather than RT. So I'd vote to 'resolve' this ticket, and maybe if the next person who picks it up agrees, they should do so.
