[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[David Sweeris]

> On Feb 23, 2017, at 4:04 PM, Ted F.A. van Gaalen via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 23 Feb 2017, at 02:24, Dave Abrahams <dabrahams at apple.com <mailto:dabrahams at apple.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Equally a non-starter. All known threadsafe schemes that require caches to be updated upon non-mutating operations have horrible performance issues, and further this would penalize all string code by reserving space for the cache and filling it even for the vast majority of operations that don't require random access.
> Well, maybe “caching” is not the right description for what I've suggested.
> It is more like:
>   let all strings be stored as they are now, but as soon as you want to work with 
> random accessing parts of a string just “lift the string out of normal optimised string storage” 
>  and then add (temporarily)  a Character array so one can work with this array directly ” 
> which implies that all other strings remain as they are.  ergo: efficiency 
> is only reduced for the “elevated” strings,
> Using e.g. str.freeSpace(), if necessary, would then place the String back 
> in its normal storage domain, thereby disposing the Character array
> associated with it. 

Wouldn’t that turn simple character access into a mutating function?

- Dave Sweeris
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