Andrey Semashev wrote:
What is the practical advantage of using span (of any provider) over the traditional pointer+size? I emphasize the "practical" part, as opposed to any personal preference to "modern-ness", code style or anything like that.
The practical advantage is that if a library is rewritten to use spans throughout, and never pointer arithmetic, this (a) automatically adds bounds checks everywhere and (b) makes the library warning-free under the new -Wunsafe-buffer-usage, which is all the rage nowadays because Chromium developers are rewriting Chromium as above. https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SafeBuffers.html Longer term, it's quite likely that a memory safety "Profile" (Profiles are also all the rage nowadays because they are Bjarne and Herb's proposal to "solve" safety) will be essentially equivalent to -Werror=unsafe-buffer-usage as far as pointer arithmetic is concerned. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p3081r0.pdf