[swift-dev] Disallowing weak struct properties

[Jordan Rose]

Hi, everyone. What do you think about dropping support for 'weak' in struct properties? This would fix a semantic issue—'let' structs containing weak properties won't change out from under you—and (AFAICT) would make all values trivially movable, which is a great quality to have.

This wouldn't change local variables, top-level variables, or class properties, just structs. It would make having an array of weak references a little harder, but honestly we should have proper weak-supporting collections anyway; as I understand it the behavior you usually want is auto-compacting rather than leaving a hole. (Evidence: Cocoa has NSHashTable for weak sets and NSMapTable for dictionaries with weak keys and/or values; there's no variant of NSArray that supports weak references other than by making a custom CFArray and being very very careful how you access it.)

Anyway, thoughts? It's not really my department but it cleans up the same areas that are being affected by struct resilience.
Jordan

P.S. I know this would have to go through swift-evolution for real. I just want to know if it's a silly idea to begin with.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-dev/attachments/20160129/cf93d3cd/attachment.html>