[swift-dev] [idle] COW wrapper in 30 lines

[Dave Abrahams]

on Wed Mar 09 2016, Jordan Rose <swift-dev-AT-swift.org> wrote:

> Just for fun, I wrote a wrapper for COW types that don't need the flexible inline storage of ManagedBuffer. It turned
> out to be pretty straightforward, though I didn't bother with materializeForSet and thus am incurring the cost of
> many extra value copies on mutation. The major downside is having to forward all operations through, something I'm
> sure the implementers of Array and Dictionary are very used to!
>
> Disclaimer: This is not performant; don't use it in your app.

Several issues with this:

1. a performant CoW type will often *not* want to start by copying
   itself when there is a mutation.  A trivial example: when you clear
   an Array.  So a simpleminded “always make a copy when I write the
   value” approach is not going to scale.

2. The thing in your box has to be a value type for this to work.  It's
   pretty uncommon that a thing that's already a value type benefits
   from being CoW-ified in this way.  That could usually only happen
   when it is quite atypically large.  It's a fine optimization to make
   when you can use it, but it doesn't change the programming model.
   The more interesting case for CoW is to produce value semantics where
   you otherwise wouldn't have it (e.g. Array).

-- 
-Dave