Why can't stride be 0?

[tera]

@Joe_Groff

Another difference between Swift and Rust is that Swift doesn't always monomorphize, so tolerating zero strides would incur an extra dynamic check on every unspecialized array iteration.

What dynamic check? Is that in relation to what Jordan wrote? Could the loop be changed to always go by for i in ..< count instead of while pointer < stop { ... pointer++ }.

@bbrk24

C++ (but not C) also enforces a minimum size of 1, and it doesn’t have any unspecialized generic code, fwiw.

AFAIU for C++ it's important to maintain identity of elements, there it would be bad if &a[0] == &a[1]. Equally in Swift it would be bad for reference types to be of a stride 0, but that's impossible anyway (there are at one or two words of overhead in class bodies for ISA, etc).