[fpc-devel] Feature request/discussion - SetLengthNoInit

[J. Gareth Moreton]

You all make good points.  It's why I didn't suggest changing SetLength 
because of the well-defined and safe behaviour, and yes, the System unit 
is already crowded with intrinsics, and will become even more crowded 
once the naming format of the assembly intrinsics are finalised.  The 
optional parameter (or a new intrinsic) wouldn't change anything that 
already exists, and can be documented.

I'm willing to settle with SetLength(array, len, ... len, NoInit: 
Boolean = False), but of course it depends on the overall support for 
it, which isn't looking too promising currently!

Gareth aka. Kit

On 15/09/2020 10:11, Sven Barth wrote:
> J. Gareth Moreton via fpc-devel <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org 
> <mailto:fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>> schrieb am Mo., 14. Sep. 
> 2020, 19:00:
>
>     With all this in mind, would there be support for an intrinsic
>     such as
>     "SetLengthNoInit" or "SetLengthNoClear" or some similar name that has
>     all the benefits of SetLength (especially the reference counting) but
>     doesn't initialise new elements to zero? If I'm learning one
>     thing, Free
>     Pascal is finding a niche in some scientific applications, and
>     speed can
>     be essential sometimes.
>
>
> I'm against adding support for this. Dynamic arrays have guaranteed 
> behavior. If users find that this behavior is not appropriate for 
> their use case then they should not use them (or as you already 
> suggested, preallocate them).
>
> Regards,
> Sven
>


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