DIP 1025--Dynamic Arrays Only Shrink, Never Grow--Community Review Round 1

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 11/11/19 4:32 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/11/2019 3:17 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Ouch. This would be a _huge_ breaking change. The ability to grow dynamic
>> arrays is used all over the place. It's also one of the great benefits of
>> D's dynamic array IMHO. The fact that you append to a dynamic array 
>> without
>> caring where it came from can be incredibly useful, and if you really 
>> care
>> about checking whether it has the capacity to grow or whether it's 
>> managed
>> by the GC, we have functions to check for that.
> 
> While:
> 
>     a ~= b;
> 
> would no longer be allowed,
> 
>     a = a ~ b;
> 
> would be. Yes, it is a breaking change, but the fix for when that 
> behavior is desired is pretty simple.

This is not the same. Appending has amortized cost, while concatenation 
is not. Expect to have D applications which use this approach for 
updating explode in runtime.

-Steve