pointers, assignments, Garbage Collection Oh My?

[Maxim Fomin]

On Wednesday, 10 July 2013 at 18:22:24 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> And to be pedantic, length comes first:
>
> struct Array (T)
> {
>     size_t length;
>     T* ptr;
> }
>
> Which is actually property-like because assigning to length 
> does pretty complex stuff. So the member cannot be named as 
> 'length':
>
> struct Array (T)
> {
>     size_t length_;
>     T* ptr;
> }
>
> Anyway... :)
>
> Ali

To be pedantic dynamic arrays are implemented in D simply as

struct Array
{
     size_t length;
     void* ptr;
}

and there is no type parametrization since such arrays handling 
is opaque for users (in druntime they are treated as void[]). 
Parametrization can be useful in user side since performing any 
operations with structure above (void*) will lead to errors. But 
in user side there is no point in manipulating the structure 
directly, as it can be done using usual properties/druntime 
without template bloat. By the way, the style ABI page is 
written, allows implementation to have more fields.