Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr>]

On 07/08/2014 02:24 PM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> It will create confusion even with actively maintained code bases. What
> could help here is very clear communication when the change will be the
> standard behavior, and how the migration will take place.

It's a very different kind of criticism from your initial point about 
the decision of going into the current direction.  Point taken: the 
development team will need to communicate about the expected timeline 
and migrate path.  But note that 4.02 is not even out, and since the 
default behavior is the previous one, there is no hurry, and it's fine 
if people wait a few months before trying the new mode.   It doesn't 
seem crazy to wait for some early user feedback and synchronize with 
them before deciding on a more precise plan for the wider community. For 
instance, you feedback about porting ocamlnet is quite useful and the 
current discussion shows that several solutions compete and need further 
thought.  Without the new compiler switch, this discussion would not 
have taken place.

> Right, that's the good side of it. (Although the danger is quite
> theoretical, as most programmers seem to intuitively follow the rule
> "don't mutate strings you did not create". I've never seen this kind of
> bug in practice.)

Still, library functions such as string_of_bool, or string_of_format (in 
the previous version) had to be written carefully, with extra copies, to 
avoid public humiliation (or not).

> I think it would be quite important to have that in the stdlib:
>
>   - This sets a standard for interoperability between libraries
>   - The stdlib can exploit the details of the representation
>   - It would be possible to use stringlike directly in C interfaces

Note that if it goes to stdlib, one cannot refer to bigarrays.  (One 
might want to have bigarrays in stdlib, but we are not there yet.)

-- Alain