Disadvantages of ARC

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/6/14, 10:15 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> That's only because the current output range API consists of only a
> single .put method. Please see the other thread started by Adam Ruppe:
> we should spend some time to think about how we can streamline output
> ranges so that they can be used just as easily as input ranges --
> y'know, with UFCS chaining and such, that doesn't require a ton of
> boilerplate like the current process of: declare output range, pass to
> function, get data from result, pass to next function, etc.. This is
> primarily a syntactical problem, not a logical one, and since we're so
> good at syntactic bikeshedding, we should be able to solve this
> relatively easily, right? ;-)

I don't think it's that easy. For example the output range must be 
passed as a ref parameter into the function, which is already 
introducing friction.

FWIW things we can add are to output ranges:

~= for convenience
.flush() or .done() to mark the end of several writes
.clear() to clear the range (useful if e.g. it's implemented as a slice 
with appending)


Andrei