Need help with druntime PR 2838 (fix for issue 11725: aa.dup should return mutable copy)

[Simen Kjærås]

On Thursday, 24 October 2019 at 19:11:29 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/2838
>
> Basically, the problem is that the new version of AA.dup 
> returns a mutable copy of an AA, but the compiler is not 
> inferring uniqueness for the return value so dup'ing an 
> immutable AA (like int[int]) cannot implicitly convert back to 
> the original type.
>
> I looked at .dup for arrays in object.d, and apparently there's 
> some kind of trick involving DIP25 that allows the compiler to 
> infer uniqueness (thereby implicit convertibility to the 
> original type), but I don't understand how it works or 
> how/whether it can be applied to the AA case.
>
> Any ideas?

Pretty sure this is on DMD, and not something you can work around 
in a library. This reduced example shows the problem:

unittest {
     import std.traits : Parameters;
     Parameters!fun a;
     immutable b = fun(a);
}

pure int[int] fun(int[int] funarg) {
     int[int] aa;
     return aa;
}

It fails to compile for the exact same reason.

Interestingly, fun([1:1]) *does* implicitly convert to immutable, 
and if you change funarg in any way to differ from 
ReturnType!fun, it seems to compile. I'd chalk it up to 
overzealous purity checks.

--
   Simen