<div dir="ltr">I agree that the need to immediately wrap in a BufferPointer is awkward. I've been consistently thrown by the fact that we specify how many items to allocate on the 'single' pointers, though.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 1:08 PM, Joe Groff via swift-evolution <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" target="_blank">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
> On Jan 22, 2016, at 11:31 PM, Guillaume Lessard via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
> Hello,<br>
><br>
> I disagree with the following change to UnsafeMutablePointer:<br>
> - public static func alloc(num: Int) -> UnsafeMutablePointer<Pointee><br>
> + public init(allocatingCapacity count: Int)<br>
><br>
> This would make it the only constructor in any of OpaquePointer, UnsafePointer, UnsafeMutablePointer and UnsafeReference to have the side-effect of allocating memory. All the others are relatively cheap transformations on pointer values, and get used a lot for typecasting. An allocating constructor would be less locatable among such uses of typecasting-via-constructor. The memory-allocating static method has the merit of sticking out, and pairs nicely with the necessary deallocation call, like the malloc/free pair.<br>
<br>
This all probably deserves a separate discussion from the overall umbrella proposal. Another thing to consider here is whether the logic to allocate an array of values really belongs on UnsafeMutablePointer—it seems like a better fit for UnsafeMutableBufferPointer, whose whole job is to reference an array of objects in memory. Currently, you need to allocate the memory using UnsafeMutablePointer.alloc, then immediately wrap it in a BufferPointer with the same count, which is a bit awkward.<br>
<br>
-Joe<br>
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</blockquote></div><br></div>