Approaches for fixed-size arrays

[tera]

@Lancelotbronner

at the moment large arrays aren't imported from clang targets

Indeed. The current threshold happens to be 4096 items.

@wadetregaskis

It would be unfortunate to couple those two together, as they are orthogonal. e.g. I might want a fixed-size array with a billion elements in it. That's not going to fit on the stack.

One of the benefits of "inline" data structures (that don't allocate memory or take locks) is that we'll be able using them in realtime or other performance critical contexts... I agree that "fixed" in FixedArray doesn't carry that important meaning. Maybe FixedArray is not the right name then... InlineArray?

@wadetregaskis

I might also want a fixed-size Set, or tree, or any other data structure. The ability to specify a fixed size for a collection should be universal, not special-cased to some specific data structure (e.g. a thin shim over alloca in your implication - which is a valid and useful case as well, just not the only one).

Ideal world - yes. In reality I'd tolerate having just InlineArray that's known to "be a truly inline data type" even if it is small (up to a certain prescribed limit like 4K) and/or if it is the only container thing available of that kind. However I agree that Set of Bool or Set of enum constants is another important use case worth optimising.