Casting away immutability

[Kagamin via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 at 04:04:54 UTC, Sergei Degtiarev 
wrote:
> I seems a little bit too easy to to shoot yourself in the foot.

Yes, cast is a little not fool-proof in this scenario.

On Thursday, 3 September 2015 at 13:28:54 UTC, Sergei Degtiarev 
wrote:
> Agree, however, memory obtained with mmap(..., PROT_READ, ..); 
> is essentially read-only and any attempt to write to it will 
> cause immediate crash with segmentation violation. It would be 
> very desirable in this case to return something that could be 
> cast to immutable(type)[] but not type[].

If you can't write to it doesn't mean it won't change. Use const 
for memory that you can't write to.

On Thursday, 3 September 2015 at 16:05:33 UTC, Sergei Degtiarev 
wrote:
> Absolutely, instead of returning raw void[] and allow user to 
> cast it, std.mmfile should implement template function to 
> return desired type.

Well, interpretation of data can be arbitrarily complex, I'd 
suggest that the raw data should be passed to your specific 
parser, that will do the right thing and provide data in expected 
format.