[swift-evolution] [Pitch] deprecating ManagedBufferPointer

[Károly Lőrentey]

+1

ManagedBuffer has been really useful a couple of times, but I never found a use for ManagedBufferPointer. I can’t even say I’m entirely sure what need it was originally designed to fulfill.

> On 2016-10-11, at 00:12, Erik Eckstein via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> The purpose of ManagedBufferPointer is to create a buffer with a custom class-metadata to be able to implement a custom deinit (e.g. to destroy the tail allocated elements).
> It was used in Array (before I replaced it with the new tail-allocated-array-built-ins). But now it’s not used anymore in the standard library.
> 
> As a replacement for ManagedBufferPointer one can just derive a class from ManagedBuffer and implement the deinit in the derived class.
> 
> final class MyBuffer : ManagedBuffer<MyHeader, MyElements> {
>   deinit {
>     // do whatever needs to be done
>   }
> }
> 
> // creating MyBuffer:
> let b = MyBuffer.create(minimumCapacity: 27, makingHeaderWith: { myb in return MyHeader(...) })
> 
> IMO ManagedBuffer is much cleaner than ManagedBufferPointer (it doesn’t need this custom bufferClass to be passed to the constructor). Also ManagedBufferPointer doesn’t use SIL tail-allocated arrays internally. Although this is not something visible to the programmer, it makes life easier for the compiler.
> 
> So I suggest that we deprecate ManagedBufferPointer.
> 
> Erik
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