Comment by randomNumber7
4 hours ago
I think Swift has great C interop but they made pointers too diffcult to use. Which of the following type do you have to use if your C API returns some pointer?
UnsafeMutablePointer, UnsafePointer, UnsafeMutableBufferPointer, UnsafeBufferPointer, UnsafeMutableRawPointer, UnsafeRawPointer, UnsafeMutableRawBufferPointer, UnsafeRawBufferPointer
?? This is comical and the only reason to make it this clunky is because "unsafe is bad" and you don't want people to use it.
You listed 8 types, and this is because there are 3 axes that each have 2 values
- Mutable or not
- Typed or Raw
- Single object, or Buffer
Given one kind of pointer, you can convert to any other kind of pointer, but you are responsible for knowing if it’s safe to do.
The API is not super intuitive, but I can see how it makes it more clear what you are doing in your code.
Your question as stated is exactly why there are so many pointer types.
Is it a pointer to raw memory or a pointer to a type? Does it have a known size? Should it be allowed to be changed?
These are all questions you have to answer in C but cannot without annotations or documentation. Languages with more expressive type systems need to map that ambiguity to something.