A great way to lower memory cost when reusing a list across thousands of atoms is to keep it in one place, and reference that everywhere. However, this opens up the potential for a developer to accidentally mutate the list, which will mess up everything else.
It would be nice to be able to freeze a list, causing a runtime error if the list was mutated.
This could just be a shallow freeze, and doesn't need to try to do crazy stuff like make the atoms inside immutable or whatever, just block insert/remove/update/etc. If a function was provided to check if a list is frozen, a developer could also make their own deep freeze proc.
Ideally there would be no way to "thaw" a list.
Prior art:
Object.freeze, Object.isFrozen in JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/ Reference/Global_Objects/Object/freeze
table.freeze, table.isfrozen in Luau: https://luau-lang.org/library#table-library
ID:2821779
 Sep 23 2022, 1:12 am
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Sep 26 2022, 5:49 pm
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Zewaka
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Even better: if this is caught by the compiler in trivial cases
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There is of course already the /static|global/ sugar to use on a given datum's members to provide the reuse part. /const/ gives us immutable static members, but only if they are simple.
Allowing /const/ on lists that only contain numbers, text, and paths at compile time and flagging them as immutable, to throw if an attempt is made, sounds like a big QOL bonus to me. | |
That would not work for any of our use cases if it limited what was inside the list, and was only available at compile time. We only need a shallow freeze and potentially a way to see if a list is frozen, like several other languages provide.
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Adding this functionality would worsen the performance of lists across the board, which is untenable.
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