Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>]

On 2014-07-22, at 23:51, Christophe Troestler wrote:

> What about having a phantom variable on bytes indicating access?  A
> string could become a "ro bytes" without copying.

Technically, that would work. In the latest developers meeting, we
decided against the phantom type approach because its main advantage
is also its main drawback: it takes advantage of the common
representation of string and bytes.

By keeping the two types separate, we get the freedom of representing
them differently. While we have no short-term plan to do that in the
normal OCaml runtime, we expect this to be a big win for the likes of
ocamljava and js_of_ocaml.

Also, as far as we can tell (and we need user feedback at this point)
strings and byte buffers are quite distinct in normal OCaml source,
so we wouldn't win much by being able to mix them.

We are also open to feedback and suggestions on convenience functions
that could be added to string.ml to help build strings in common cases
without going through a bytes value (http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6500 )

-- Damien