On 08/26/2010 07:07 AM, Mathias Gaunard wrote:
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There is no "inherently supported" or "not inherently supported". Linearizing the memory means you have to copy it in a contiguous buffer.
I'm not sure which protocol you're thinking of, but even over a UDP socket you can use scatter/gather send/recv (at least under POSIX). It is not clear that this mechanism is necessarily substantially more efficient in practice than just copying the data to a contiguous buffer, but in principle it seems useful for the data structure, assuming it is in fact represented as a sequence of arrays, to provide a way to access that underlying representation for the purpose of IO. Although I imagine this facility would be used most often with char arrays, I agree there is no advantage (except perhaps faster compilation due to reduced use of templates) in restricting it to char.
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Then why the string_handle thing? You want a type that represents the expression.
It seems that the idea would be better realized by replacing string_handle with auto. Still, I would think the same result could be achieved by implementing certain optimizations in the existing join, e.g. joining statically sized arrays produces a single statically sized array.
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