[Mono-dev] [Dotnet-runtime-dev] ASCII Strings Proposal

[Miguel de Icaza]

Right, that section is part of "How to go from point zero to dual encoding
strings", I clarified the text a little bit.

Miguel

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 3:15 AM, Jonathan Gilbert <logic at deltaq.org> wrote:

> Phew :-) I must have gotten the wrong idea from this:
> http://www.mono-project.com/docs/advanced/runtime/docs/ascii-strings/#disabling-fixed-on-strings
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jonathan Gilbert
>
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 12:06 AM, Miguel de Icaza <
> miguel.de.icaza at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello Jonathan,
>>
>> I personally think it is a terrible idea to make Mono completely unable
>> to run code that compiles and runs just fine on Microsoft's .NET framework.
>> Could get_OffsetToStringData be made to convert the ASCII representation
>> back to UCS-2 on-the-fly for that edge case where the code actually uses
>> the fixed (char *ptr = str) pattern? It's not a very common pattern, so
>> the overhead of the conversion, while defeating the purpose of using that
>> pattern in the first place, would affect only the tiniest minority of code.
>>
>>
>> If this were to become a standard part of Mono, that would have to be
>> done.
>>
>> The reason it is not done in the current patch is that we needed to
>> identify all the spots with issues so they could adjusted to deal with the
>> two encodings, purely a bootstrapping side effect.
>>
>> And we need the spots adjusted, so we do not needlessly create duplicate
>> strings on demand, otherwise one of the benefits of this work (reduce
>> memory pressure) would go out the window.
>>
>> If this were the direction taken, it might be nice also to provide a way
>> to force an ASCII-capable string to be UCS-2 anyway, in case there are
>> people who want the fixed (char *ptr = str) pattern to remain performant
>> -- perhaps an environment variable?? Obviously we wouldn't want the Mono
>> runtime to scan the environment block every time it allocates a string, so
>> perhaps it could do the check & cache the result once on startup, and then
>> allow some innocuous method that's already doing a lot of work, such as
>> string.IsInterned, to re-check it. This avoids adding Mono-specific API,
>> so that code written to be aware of Mono's peculiarity still runs just fine
>> on other frameworks.
>>
>>
>> Something like that.
>>
>> Miguel.
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dot.net/pipermail/mono-devel-list/attachments/20160728/645042d6/attachment-0001.html>