Pitch: Implicit Pointer Conversion for C Interoperability

[xedin (Pavel Yaskevich)]

@Chris_Lattner3

This is often suggested, but I'm not aware of a case where this worked out in practice - we usually end up with both the old thing and the new thing (e.g. lazy and property wrappers both).

From what @hborla told me, the reason why lazy is not yet generalized is due to a couple of short-comings of property wrappers which are being addressed:

• It's not as efficient because the property wrapper has to store the initialization closure in each instance. There is a pitch to make this more efficient (Add shared storage to property wrappers).
• Allowing lazy as a property wrapper to access the enclosing self. This requires syntax changes which haven't been completely flushed out.

@Chris_Lattner3

The reason they don't work out is that the new general features isn't as powerful as the special case things, don't behave exactly the same way (and we can't take a source break), or because no one goes back and cleans things up. Are you aware of any examples where this has worked out?

If we are talking about implementation, and not the language then - yes. There are multiple ongoing efforts in the type-checker to do just that: generalize all of the performance hacks, closure, result builder handling etc.