Eight functions that the file used to refuse by name, and the refusal was
always one sentence -- there is no allocator -- which stopped being true when
Vec landed. Three rules hold across all of them and are written at the head
of the section: the result is owned and the caller frees it, the allocator is
the context's, and no signature carries a Result because no allocating
operation returns an error.
The builder is not a type. Odin's strings.Builder wraps a [dynamic]u8; here
the (Vec u8) already is that and already has push, so a wrapper would be a
move-only struct whose only method is the one it wraps. What was missing is
appending a run of bytes, and append! is that -- taking a (Ptr (Vec u8)),
because a Vec parameter moves and a by-value builder would be consumed by its
first append.
append-i64! and append-f64! are the argument for the whole shape. The
runtime renders numbers into one shared static buffer, so two of its results
cannot be held at once; these copy out before returning, so a builder holds as
many numbers as it likes. strings.flan puts two integers and a float on one
line to show it.
split returns a (Vec [u8]) and not a (Vec (Vec u8)): the fields borrow the
input, and the owning shape is refused outright because a Vec copies and
releases its elements bytewise. Constructing it needed a one-line slices-new,
because (vec-new) takes its element type as a bare symbol and [u8] is not
one -- a compiler gap, noted rather than worked around in silence.
replace-bytes guards its empty needle with an if and not an early return: a
returned Vec is a move, the dead set spans the function, and a return on one
branch would kill the binding on the other.
Joseph Ferano
02850d7282