Re: Missing "av_splice()" function - API design questions

On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 10:32:08 +0100
"Paul \"LeoNerd\" Evans" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:56:28 -0400
> Michael Conrad <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > How about:  
> ...
> >    Size_t av_splice(AV *av, Size_t idx, Size_t delcount, Size_t
> > inscount, SV **sv_in, SV **sv_out);  
> 
> Mmm, the more I look at that the more I quite like it. Yes.

After Quite Some Time [tm] I have finally got around to actually
writing some code.

For now I've named it with a "_simple" suffix because it specifically
doesn't handle tied arrays (in common with a lot of the other
av_*_simple API functions).

Currently sitting in a draft PR, awaiting some further thoughts on a
few things:

  https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/24451

One further thought being: Flags for how to deal with refcount issues
(among other). Were I to start this afresh as a new API, I'd probably
have a few sets of flag constants (some of which might be zero):

  * Flags for how to handle added items:
      PERL_INSERT_UNCHANGED = 0   -- insert pointer as-is
      PERL_INSERT_REF             -- insert SvREFCNT_inc
      PERL_INSERT_SVCOPY          -- insert newSVsv

  * Flags for how to handle deleted items:
      PERL_DELETE_UNCHANGED = 0   -- do nothing
      PERL_DELETE_UNREF           -- do SvREFCNT_dec
      PERL_DELETE_MORTALIZE       -- do SAVEFREESV()

Those could apply to all sorts of APIs, not just this particular one.
Mmmm...

-- 
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans

[email protected]
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/  |  https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS