This finally makes it possible to expose APIs that take StridedArrayView
instances as an input, until now the type information was always lost,
making all views plain bytes and thus impossible to check whether the
types passed were a large enough size at least, if nothing else.
Preserving the type means there has to be type-dependent implementation
for __getitem__() and __setitem__(). So far this is only done for the
very basic builtin types, similarly to what Python's own array supports.
In the buffer protocol it used to advertise untyped data with B as the
format string, but the __getitem__ and __setitem__ were using the char
type (implicitly coming from the fact that the type exposed is
ArrayView<char>, StridedArrayViewND<char> or their const variants),
resulting in the data being treated as characters by Python. Which
was extremely annoying and inconsistent with how the bytes and bytearray
behaves.
Now ArrayView bindings always operate with std::uint8_t, and for
StridedArrayView there's a special case for the <char> type, which makes
it treated as std::uint8_t as well. Furthermore, to hint that the <char>
is "general data", the format string for it is null / None instead of B.
It limits the support for CMake 3.12+, but it's much less verbose and I
don't expect people to use ancient CMake versions with IDEs like Xcode
or VS anyway, so this should be fine.
Not ArrayView yet, and also no documentation on this whatsoever. That'll
come next. Also not everything works with arbitrary types yet,
converting from buffer protocol doesn't remember the format and
conversion to bytes doesn't take the actual type size into account
either.
Compared to having to subclass every type that can reference external
data, this has several advantages for 3rd party binding code:
* it doesn't need to worry about the additional type when binding
function arguments (currently it had to provide lambdas that accept
the PyFoo subtype instead of just Foo)
* and it can now easily bind those types also for function
return values and properties -- the return type doesn't need to be
subclassed (which in case of move-only types is practically
impossible) but instead just wrapped in a holder along with the
memory owner object reference
The new holders also assert that memory owner is always specified unless
the data is empty.
Vladimír Vondruš