[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0125: Remove NonObjectiveCBase and isUniquelyReferenced

[Arnold]

On Darwin and iOS systems it would be hard to implement a uniques check efficiently for objective c objects.

You can't rely on retainCount is what I remember. NonPointer ISA, slide tables that contain weak and actual reference counts would make it hard to make such a check efficient.

This would certainly be out of scope for swift  3

We can add the API you propose later.

It has different semantics to the existing API.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 20, 2016, at 6:22 AM, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com> wrote:

>> On Jul 20, 2016, at 5:59 AM, Arnold Schwaighofer <aschwaighofer at apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The reason for this combination is data structures like Array which might hold an objc class which is not mutable. On a mutating operation you check is it uniquely reference and a swift class - if the answer is yes and you have enough storage you store to the current instance. (You can’t store to an NSArray for example, you would have to check it was a NSMutableArray, etc …)
> 
> It sounds to me like this is specifically tuned to the bridging the standard library happens to do, but you could very well want the opposite behavior in other cases. (For instance, `NSCountedSet` and `NSURLComponents` are both always-mutable; COW structs built around them would want to examine their refcounts.)
> 
> Is this the design we want to publish to users of the standard library? Or would it be better to have an `isNonObjectiveC(_:)` call and an `isUniquelyReferenced(_:)` call, and perhaps wrap them into one call for the standard library's internal use?
> 
> -- 
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
>