Usability of pointers in Swift

Using Swift
57

To sum up my own difficulties with the pointers API:

  1. They are all named "unsafe", but some are more unsafe than others.

    Look no further than above for one example.

  2. Swift pointers create an "axiomatic" system of guarantees against know traps, but both axioms and traps are obscure/unknown to many developers, and practical problem solving need theorems more than axioms.

    Many developers are looking for an Arithmetic Rope on their desk, rather than a copy of Euclid's Elements in their bookshelf. The first is easy to use and never lies, when the latter requires you to derive proofs (and make mistakes on the way).

  3. In the traps I can remember from memory (aliasing, wrong alignment, uninitialized memory, the difference between assumingMemoryBound and bindMemory and the rationale behind it, short-lived pointers, ...), some are "classic" (can be found in other languages, and Googled), and some are specific to Swift (surprise!).

I totally dig that a sane and sound "axiomatic" system needed to be built first. But what's next? Who will derive the few simple and useful theorems that will make pointers easy to use?

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