dcollections 1.0 and 2.0a beta released

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sat, 22 May 2010 07:56:31 -0400, Michel Fortin  
<michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

> On 2010-05-21 22:55:16 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com>  
> said:
>
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> If we can get anywhere close to that level of success with ranges and  
>>> containers, we should all be well pleased.
>>  Mike Taylor has a phrase for that I think is well-coined: "impedance  
>> matching",
>> defined as the work necessary to get one library module to work with  
>> another
>> library module.
>
> This makes me think about something.
>
> In principle, I like the idea of containers being reference type. It  
> works well when passing a container to functions. But at the same time,  
> I despite it. By-reference containers forces you to have extra  
> indirections even when you don't need them, and you have to worry about  
> null. Sometime a value-type would be better, when creating more complex  
> data structures for instance:
>
> 	class Channel {
> 		private {
> 			Array!Message inbound;
> 			Array!Message outbound;
> 		}
>
> 		...
> 	}
>
> What's the point of having extra indirection here?

Scope class members should solve this.  It's been thrown around forever --  
essentially, you should be able to define that a class member's storage is  
contained within the owner object.

a value-type node-based containers just don't work well -- it's too easy  
to escape references, and too easy to accidentally duplicate the entire  
node set when passing to functions.  It works fine for arrays because the  
array has a very simple structure -- data and length.  And the length and  
data are somewhat orthogonal.

-Steve