Why are void[] contents marked as having pointers?

[Denis Koroskin]

On Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:53:02 +0400, BCS <none at anon.com> wrote:

> Hello Vladimir,
>
>> I just went through a ~15000-line project and replaced most
>> occurrences of void[]. Now the project is an ugly mess of void[],
>> ubyte[] and casts, but at least it doesn't leak memory like crazy any
>> more.
>>  I don't know why it was decided to mark the contents of void[] as
>> "might have pointers". It makes no sense! Consider:
>>  2) Despite that void[] is "typeless", you can still operate on it -
>> namely, slice and concatenate them. Pass a void[] to a network send()
>> function - how much did you send? Half the buffer? No problem, slice
>> it away and store the rest - and no casts.
>>  3) It's very rare in practice that the only pointer to your object
>> (which you still plan to access later) to be stored in a
>> void[]-allocated array! Remember, the properties of memory regions are
>> determined when the memory is allocated, so casting an array of
>> structures to a void[] will not lose you that reference. You'd need to
>> move your pointer to a void[]-array (which you need to allocate
>> explicitly or, for example, concatenating your reference to the
>> void[]), then drop the reference to your original structure, for this
>> to happen.
>>
>
> I think the idea is that void[] is the most general data type; it can be  
> anything, including pointers.  
> Also for a real world use case where void[]=mightHavePointers is valid,  
> consider a system that reads blocks of data structures from a file and  
> then does in place substation from file references to memory references.  
> You can't allocate buffers of the correct type because you may not even  
> know what that is until you have already loaded the data.
>

In this case you should *explicitly* mark that void[] array as "mightHavePointers".