[bitc-dev] [Feature Request] Invariant Strings

[Geoffrey Irving]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Rick R <rick.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry for asking this because I know this probably not at the top of the
> feature list at the moment, but I don't have anywhere else to make this
> suggestion before I forget it.
>
> I would really like to to see invariant strings be supported as the basic
> string primitive in BitC.
> Invariant Strings are, in my opinion, the largest success to come out of D.
> They make string intensive code faster and allow for simpler assurance of
> thread-safety.
> They do require GC/Ref counting to work correctly, also, given special needs
> for copy on write semantics, it would be much more successful when supported
> by the language itself. I made an Invariant String lib for C++, it resulted
> in huge performance gains over std::string, but was unwieldy (what isn't in
> c++ :) ).
>
> Any thoughts on this?

Immutability is already one of the core principles of the language, so
you're all set. :)

    http://www.bitc-lang.org/docs/bitc/spec.html#3.7

Geoffrey