memviews

Unsafe in-place slicing


Keywords
library, slice, slicing, shallow, array, vector
License
MIT
Install
nimble install memviews

Documentation

The memviews module implements a very thin wrapper around array like types in Nim or any contiguous memory region you have a pointer to. It can be used to make shallow slices of your data, have a uniform interface to both seq and string (among other types) and acess C arrays more naturally and with optional bounds checking.

Be carefull with the lifetime of the allocations you are viewing into, as the view possess only an unmanaged pointer to the data. If the GC collects your data, or you explicily deallocate it, this pointer may become invalid and undefined behaviour ensues. You may have to use GC_ref() and GC_unref() to manually stick the memory around.

The same may happen if the data is reallocated to another point in the memory. For example, when a sequence has to grow as a result of ".add()". One should abstain to change the original seq in those ways.

MemViews don't suport automatic growth as it don't owns the data it is pointing to. However, you can mutate any point of this memory.

It is similar to Adrian Veith seqslices, but much simpler, less safe and more general.