Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Markus Mottl <markus.mottl@gmail.com>]

I agree that the new concept has some noteworthy downsides as
demonstrated in the Lexing-example.  Your proposed solution 2
(stringlike) would probably solve these issues from a safety point of
view.  The downside is that the complexity of string-handling would
increase even more, because then we would have three types to deal
with.  I personally prefer safety over convenience, but other people's
(especially beginner's) mileage may vary.

The Bigarray-approach doesn't seem appealing to me.  Strings are much
more lightweight, since they can be allocated cheaply on the
OCaml-heap.  E.g. String.create is about 10x-100x faster than
Bigarray.create.  That seems too big to ignore.

Regards,
Markus

On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I've just posted a blog article where I criticize the new concept of
> immutable strings that will be available in OCaml 4.02 (as option):
>
> http://blog.camlcity.org/blog/bytes1.html
>
> In short my point is that it the new concept is not far reaching enough,
> and will even have negative impact on the code quality when it is not
> improved. I also present three ideas how to improve it.
>
> Gerd
> --
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> Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
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> Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
> Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
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-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com