Array expanding

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:42:31 -0500, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  
wrote:

> On Sunday, December 18, 2011 22:12:07 RenatoL wrote:
>> Reading the book from Alexandrescu we can find this (page 103-104,
>> at least in my edition):
>>
>> Expanding arrays has a couple of subtleties that concern possible
>> reallocation of the array. Consider:
>>
>> auto a = [87, 40, 10, 2];
>> auto b = a; // Now a and b refer to the same chunk
>> a ~= [5, 17]; // Append to a
>> a[0] = 15; // Modify a[0]
>> assert(b[0] == 15); // Pass or fail?
>>
>> it seems natural that the test is ok but it is not... if we read
>> more we find:
>> "D leaves~= the freedom of either expanding by reallocation or
>> opportunistically expanding in place if there is enough unused
>> memory at the end of the current array."
>>
>> At a first glance this seems to be a serious issue... it seems hard
>> to accept that b can lost its connection to "a" in a silent mode due
>> to a reallocation
>>
>> Is there a safe mode to do this for large arrays?
>
> Read this: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dcollections/wiki/ArrayArticle

In particular, this section covers the issue:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/dcollections/wiki/ArrayArticle#Determinism

And this section covers the additional functions that give you more info  
about the underlying array type:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/dcollections/wiki/ArrayArticle#SliceMembersandtheAppender

-Steve