DIP 1027---String Interpolation---Format Assessment

Steven Schveighoffer schveiguy at gmail.com
Fri Feb 28 19:16:08 UTC 2020


On 2/28/20 5:17 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On Friday, 28 February 2020 at 03:10:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> I don't know Swift, but this looks like the "generate strings and 
>> concatenate them" approach.
> 
> No, it basically lowers to bunch of method calls. Here's an example of 
> how it could look like with D syntax:
> 
> auto a = 3;
> auto b = i"foo $a bar";
> 
> Could be lowered to:
> 
> auto _temp = StringInterpolation(8 /* literal capacity */, 1 /* 
> interpolation count */);
> _temp.appendLiteral("foo ");
> _temp.appendInterpolation(a);
> _temp.appendLiteral(" bar");
> auto b = _temp.toString();

I think Walter's point is that swift is still appending strings and then 
returning that. This requires allocations, and is not as preferable as 
directly processing the data. Not only that, but it's generating 
temporary strings just to add them to the larger thing that will be 
printed (I'm assuming this is not just a big string but an array/list, 
due to the beginning of the video and s1+s2+s3+s4).

I'd much prefer for example, printing using DIP1027 than constructing a 
string (even if the memory is reasonably fast, like malloc) just to 
throw it away.

I watched a lot of that video, it didn't impress me much. I use swift 
interpolation strings quite a bit, and they are useful. But I think D's 
will be much more performant and more straightforward for hooking (if 
they ever get in).

-Steve


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