primitive vector types

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:00 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
>>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yah. Walter agrees that that's the right thing to do. The only thing that
>>>> worries us is passing by-value large statically-sized vectors to template
>>>> functions. But then gaming code wants to do exactly that.
> 
> I don't follow you.  Wouldn't they rather pass such huge chunks of
> data by reference?
> 
> --bb

What I'm saying (sorry for being unclear) is:

1. If we choose T[N] as a value type, the downside is that people may 
pass large arrays by values to e.g. template functions.

2. The upside is that gaming programmers DO want to pass short arrays of 
type T[N] by value.

The conundrum is that a type system can't say that T[N] has some 
semantics for N <= Nmax and some other semantics for N > Nmax. So we 
need to pick one, and probably picking the value semantics is the right 
thing to do.


Andrei