[swift-evolution] Marking sort and sorted with rethrows

[Dave Abrahams]

on Wed Jun 08 2016, Chris Lattner <clattner-AT-apple.com> wrote:

>> On Jun 8, 2016, at 7:52 AM, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Is there a widely used comparison function that throws?
>> 
>> Any comparison function that examines external data related to the instance:
>> 
>> * Sorting filenames by the data in the corresponding files
>> * Instances backed by a database where actually loading the data could fail
>> * Etc.
>
> Ok, instead of using rethrows, would it be a better overall design be
> to define two overloads, one that takes a throwing closure and one
> that doesn’t?  This allows the throw-supporting implementation to be
> slower without punishing the normal case..

There is *no reason* to do this.

* Most sorting algorithms can be written so that even if the comparison
  throws, no elements are lost

* Even if elements were lost—though it might indeed be surprising—it's
  not actually a problem we should solve, especially not by penalizing
  performance.  It's *very* unlikely that a partially scrambled
  collection is of any use to the caller in real code.

* Giving commit-or-rollback semantics for every operation is not
  something we should do by penalizing performance. Commit-or-rollback
  does not compose, and therefore ends up uselessly penalizing
  performance in compositions.

-- 
Dave