[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Renaming sizeof, sizeofValue, strideof, strideofValue

[John McCall]

> On Jun 2, 2016, at 1:43 PM, Russ Bishop <xenadu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 11:30 AM, John McCall via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> I still think the value-based APIs are misleading and that it would be better to ask people to just use a type explicitly.
>> 
>> John.
> 
> 
> I agree; in fact why aren’t these properties on the type itself? The type is what matters; why can’t the type just tell me it’s size? 
> Having free functions or magic operators seems to be another holdover from C. 
> 
> 
>     Int.size
>     Int.alignment
>     Int.spacing
> 
>     let x: Any = 5
>     type(of: x).size
> 
> 
> The compiler should be able to statically know the first three values and inline them. The second is discovering the size dynamically.

Two reasons.  The first is that this is a user-extensible namespace via static members, so it's somewhat unfortunate to pollute it with names from the library.  The second is that there's currently no language mechanism for adding a static member to every type, so this would have to be built-in.  But I agree that in the abstract a static property would be preferable.

John.
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