[Swan-dev] can shunk_t (string chunk) be merged into chunk_t (byte chunk)

[Paul Wouters]

I am not a fan of shunk_t. I think the abstraction adds too much complexity. Things are already hard enough to understand for outsiders. 

Paul

Sent from mobile device

> On Jan 21, 2019, at 13:40, Andrew Cagney <andrew.cagney at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This came up in an offline discussion.  While chunk_t is intended for
> bytes and shunk_t is intended for characters, they do both provide
> pointer+length abstractions.  This begs the question: should they be
> merged?  It turns out that they have a critical difference:
> 
> - chunk_t points at writable data but shunk_t points at read-only data
> 
> so I'd argue no.  For instance, a construct like:
> 
>    const char string[4] = { 'H', 'e', 'l', 'p', };
>    shunk_t s = { .ptr = string, .len = sizeof(string), };
> 
> is valid (unlike strspn() et.al., shunks don't assume NUL
> termination), where as:
> 
>    chunk_t c = { .ptr = (uint8_t*) string, .len = sizeof(string), };
> 
> is not.
> 
> What might useful are:
> 
> - think of a better name - string_t would be terrible, slice_t might be better
> - change .ptr to 'const uint8_t*', but that would break things like
> .ptr = "a string" :-(
> 
> Andrew
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