Comment by masklinn
1 year ago
> If the problem is that slices are somewhat complex, allowing aliasing sure.
No, the problem is what I put at the top, that slices are hopelessly confused, they have two completely different and incompatible purposes and Go does not let you differentiate between the two.
Understanding what slices are does not help, neither in theory nor in practice.
The way I see it, this is just lower level for mechanical sympathy and one is still free to implement a copy-on-write wrapper. Been there, done that.
The trick in understanding what they are is to understand that these are not vectors if I try to get closer to your semantics. Once it is viewed purely as a kind of reference type, a view in a backing array, it has only one meaning.
It's easier for a traditional functional language to implement lists and vectors perhaps because they operate on the premise of immutability first. Beware of the memory footprint though.
I admit that it might be easier to think in term of vectors. That's kind of what was done designing the wrapper.
Still, as I understand, slices are just lower-level. Immutability is a higher, language level concept.