[phobos] I think we need to make an emergency release

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday 25 August 2010 12:48:22 Steve Schveighoffer wrote:
> Alright, I have now a working Appender to replace the current one (along
> with the appropriate changes to phobos).
> 
> This one should be completely usable in safe mode save a couple of
> functions (clear and shrinkTo).
> 
> Before I commit, I want to get the opinions of others on this:
> 
> One very very notable difference from the original appender is it does not
> take a pointer as the parameter.  This means it does not update the
> original array you pass to it (well, it does, but will not modify the
> length).  There was only really a couple places in phobos that used this
> to an advantage, most places that used appender had code like this:
> 
> string buf;
> auto app = appender(&buf);
> 
> And then never used buf again.
> 
> So I'm wondering how much this feature is needed (affecting the original
> array).  I feel its a very unsafe method of passing an array around,
> especially when we have perfectly safe ways, and the updated version of
> the array is available via the data property.

I've never liked the fact that appender worked that way, and that's part of the 
reason that I haven't used it much. I'm all for a safer implementation. Of 
course, because I haven't use appender much, my take on things could be quite a 
bit different from those who have (and they're the ones who are going to be 
affected most by this).

- Jonathan M Davis