[swift-evolution] Pitch: Improved Swift pointers

[Andrew Trick]

> On Jul 18, 2017, at 11:36 AM, Taylor Swift <kelvin13ma at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure removing the need for implicit casts is a goal. I did
> that with the pointer `init` methods, but now I think that should be
> cleaned up to reduce API surface. I think smaller API surface wins in
> these cases. Is there a usability issue you're solving?
> 
> Yes, I can imagine initializing a mutable pointer to some values, and then wanting to use that pointer as a source to initialize more buffers. Having to convert a mutable pointer to an immutable pointer is annoying because a function that takes an immutable pointer obviously shouldn’t care if the pointer could be mutated anyway. It’s like having to rebind a `var` variable to a `let` constant before passing it as any non-inout argument to a function, since function parameters are immutable. At any rate, this only applies to two out of the seven memorystate operations, so comparably, it’s not a big API expansion at all.

The conversion you’re talking about should be handled by the compiler.

public func get<T>(_ p: UnsafePointer<T>) -> T {
  return p.pointee
}

public func foo<T>(p: UnsafeMutablePointer<T>) {
  _ = get(p)
}

Or are you thinking of a different use case?

-Andy
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