3 ms·

I wonder how feasible it would be to decouple data size from type & overflow semantics, a la this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7103347 https:/

• AndyKelley 11y ago
  The comment you linked is insightful and the commenter is indeed in the target audience for the language. One point I didn't understand is this: "decoupling of on-the-wire layout from in-memory layout". What does that mean? This is good stuff, and I plan to work on some embedded projects to experience firsthand the needs of this kind of project.
  • versteegen 11y ago
    On-the-wire refers to serialisation (writing to file or socket). It would be great to be able to specify both in-memory layout and serialised layout: the former typically contains padding, which is a waste of space in the later. There may also be endianness differences, different datatypes, etc. That would remove the need to manually write de/serialisation routines if they should differ.
    • chubot 11y ago
      So basically capnproto built into the language?
  • adrusi 11y ago
    I think that commenter meant that he wants to be able to separately declare physical and logicical layout of datatypes, and be able to assign multiple physical representations to a single logical representation, for different places they might be stored. I'm not sure how I understand how this would offer a benefit over just explicitly converting between identical logical representations with different physical representations, and it would definitely increase complexity.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• PeCaN 11y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong: Does this mean something like (pseudo-C): struct weird_bit_field { uint8_t x : 32; }; i.e. an 8-bit int that takes 4 bytes of space? Or am I misunderstanding something?