Resizable Arrays?

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Jason House (jason.james.house at gmail.com)'s article
> Sean Kelly Wrote:
> > Jason House wrote:
> > > Are there any good reasons to allow built in arrays to be resizable?
> > >
> > > There's already plenty of empirical evidence that building arrays by
appending is incredibly slow.
> > >
> > > There are also bugs in bugzilla where resizing arrays after assigning one
array to another violates type safety. Those bugs can be solved by always
reallocatimg arrays when resizing, but that makes performance even worse...
> > >
> > > While not much of an argument, C# also prevents array resizing.
> > >
> > > Is it time to rely on standard libraries for data structures and let built
in arrays be fixed length? It's a breaking change...
> >
> > C has dynamic arrays now.  If D got rid of them I might just cry.
> By dynamic, do you mean no length as part of the type or resizable in place?
Array resizing can lead to hidden allocations, which is against Tango design (my
closest proxy for your style preferences). My past use of arrays in C did not
include calls to reallocate them in place.

IMHO, you can't have a high level language while at the same time completely
avoiding hidden allocations.  The whole point of D is that it's supposed to be a
higher level language than the others in its niche, namely C and C++.  The cliche
is that we should forget about small efficiencies 97% of the time.  If you're
writing something that falls in that 97%, in a high level language, stuff should
just work and you shouldn't care about a few allocations.  If you're writing stuff
in the other 3%, the onus should be on you to avoid features with hidden
allocations.  Writing performance critical or real-time code is hard, and cutting
back on (slightly) hidden allocations isn't going to help much.