assumeSafeAppend on slice of static array?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

I'm going through some code and thinking of ways to reduce GC pressure,
and came across a bit that needed to append some items to an array:

	T[] args;
	lex.expect("(");
	args ~= parseSingleItem(lex);
	while (!lex.empty) {
		lex.expect(",");
		args ~= parseSingleItem(lex);
	}
	lex.expect(")");
	return computeResult(args);

Now obviously, in the general case (with arbitrarily many number of
items) some GC allocations will be needed, but the most common use-cases
are actually only 1 or 2 items each time. Allocating lots of small
arrays seem to be rather wasteful, so I thought to use a static array as
a buffer instead.

The question is, is there a way to take a slice of the static array, set
the length to zero, and append to it with ~= such that when it runs out
of space in the static buffer, it will reallocate a longer array on the
GC heap? Or is this a bad idea?


T

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