Usability of pointers in Swift

[audulus (Taylor Holliday)]

@lukasa

Not if things are collections. It is senseless to ask for the count of a pointer of unbounded size, it is even more senseless to trivially allow map operations on them. This design works if you want to make the non-buffer pointers bounds checked, when vended from Swift, but given that buffer pointers have a separate reason for existing (i.e. that they're collections) you'd still want to keep that concept around.

I'm thinking of a pointer type that includes a count just for bounds checking purposes. Treating pointers as collections in such fancy ways leads to the annoying and hard to understand situation we have in Swift.

@lukasa

What I said was generally impossible, by which I mean "impossible in the general case". That is, given an arbitrary pointer vended from C, there is no unambiguous way to determine what the size of the buffer is.

For any pointer vended from a C API, it will be known somehow to the programmer what the length of the collection is.

@lukasa

That's great, I'm glad you appreciate the feature. You can have it whenever you want by turning your pointers into buffer pointers.

Note I sad "provided it doesn't make pointers annoying to use".