[swift-evolution] [late pitch] UnsafeBytes proposal

[David Sweeris]

> On Aug 15, 2016, at 13:55, Michael Ilseman via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> 
> It seems like there’s a potential for confusion here, in that people may see “UInt8” and assume there is some kind of typed-ness, even though the whole point is that this is untyped. Adjusting the header comments slightly might help:
> 
> 
> /// A non-owning view of raw memory as a collection of bytes.
> ///
> /// Reads and writes on memory via `UnsafeBytes` are untyped operations that
> /// do no require binding the memory to a type. These operations are expressed 
> /// in terms of `UInt8`, though the underlying memory is untyped.
> 
> …
> 
> You could go even further towards hinting this fact with a `typealias Byte = UInt8`, and use Byte throughout. But, I don’t know if that’s getting too excessive.

I don't think that's too excessive at all. I might even go further and say that we should call it "Untyped" instead of "Byte", to really drive home the point (many people see "byte" and think "8-bit int", which is merely a side effect of CPUs generally not having support for types *other* than ints and floats, rather than a reflection of the true "type" of the data).

- Dave Sweeris