BitArray/BitFields - Review

[Era Scarecrow]

On Sunday, 29 July 2012 at 09:03:08 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 29-Jul-12 12:55, Era Scarecrow wrote:
>> Doing it this way the arguments being passed as reference 
>> slices would ensure unneeded copies wouldn't be made. On the 
>> other hand a smaller portion of the code would need to be 
>> updated. Along with that a slice could be set as COW allowing 
>> quite a bit of flexibility.
>>
>>  Thoughts?
>
> Hm... and small array optimizations go where? BitArraySlice 
> won't be a full reference type if it does it.

  I was thinking about that; If need be the slice can point to 
another slice which holds the actual small array (Kinda a long 
workaround). The way to small array optimization to work would be 
if BitArray generated it, since when you go to slicing you either 
reference the original data in the slice, or you could drop the 
small array optimization; although a loss it would simplify code 
until you come back to it once the code is working the way it 
should.

  Another idea is to convert the struct into a class instead, 
which would allow some options, but won't be a perfect fit, and 
inheritance could be used; which would solve some of the small 
array optimization, but at what cost?