[swift-evolution] Unmanaged, and COpaquePointer vs. Unsafe(Mutable)Pointer

[Jordan Rose]

> On Dec 8, 2015, at 10:42, Joe Groff via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Dec 8, 2015, at 10:32 AM, Jacob Bandes-Storch <jtbandes at gmail.com <mailto:jtbandes at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Joe Groff <jgroff at apple.com <mailto:jgroff at apple.com>> wrote:
>> COpaquePointer is IMO a vestige that should be eliminated completely. We'd ultimately like to import opaque C structs as distinct, non-constructible types in Swift, so that they can still be well-typed UnsafePointer<OpaqueThing> types in Swift.
>> 
>> -Joe
>> 
>> That would be nice. But there is still the "context pointer" use case, where conversions to/from UnsafePointer<Void> are needed. Would it make sense for the Unmanaged type to deal in UnsafePointer<Void>, rather than COpaquePointer?
> 
> I think so, yeah.

Confirming that this is the direction we should go. We can do this independent of any changes to COpaquePointer, since you'll (almost) never want to pass a class reference through an opaque struct pointer. Feel free to make this part a formal proposal!

Jordan

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