@safe std.file.read

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, January 6, 2020 8:52:01 AM MST Steven Schveighoffer via 
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On 1/6/20 5:07 AM, WebFreak001 wrote:
> > I was wondering, how are you supposed to use std.file : read in @safe
> > code when it returns a void[] but you want to get all bytes in the file?
> >
> > Is void[] really the correct type it should be returning instead of
> > ubyte[] when it just reads a (binary) file to memory? Or should void[]
> > actually be castable to ubyte[] in @safe code?
>
> I feel like this conversation has been had before. But I think it should
> be ubyte[]. Not sure why it's void[]. Perhaps for symmetry with write,
> which takes void[] (for good reason)?

I think that in previous discussions, it was decided that in general, when
you're dealing with something like reading from / write to a file or a
socket, writing should accept void[], because then you can write any binary
data to it without casting (including objects which are being serialized),
whereas reading should give you ubyte[] or const(ubyte)[], because what
you're getting from the OS is bytes of data, and it's up to the program to
figure out what to do with them.

- Jonathan M Davis