const_buffer is a view about networking-ts HOT 4 CLOSED

some sort of 8-bit quantity

What if there is no such type on the host?

Returning std::uint8_t* would be a completely compatible change

No it wouldn't, because uint8_t is not guaranteed to exist, consider systems with 16-bit bytes.

As noted above there are various proposals for span types, and std::byte could be useful here. We can evaluate them for a v2 of this TS, or when moving these things into the main standard.

from networking-ts.

Thanks for the suggestion. The latest draft has been sent to ISO as a PDTS now, so I'll raise this as a national body against the PDTS so that the committee considers it.

from networking-ts.

I'm just going to throw this out there - it sure would be nice if const_buffer::data and mutable_buffer::data returned a pointer to some sort of 8-bit quantity instead of a pointer to void. This would allow pointer arithmetic.

I forsee the use of const_buffer for much more than just networking operations. Its a great general purpose class. You could use it in a key/value database interface to pass buffers around. We have our own Slice class which works just like const_buffer, and we will switch to const_buffer when it appears in the standard. But data returning void* is really rather pointless. Returning std::uint8_t* would be a completely compatible change, and the return value would then have more utility.

from networking-ts.

This was submitted as a National Body comment against the PDTS, and discussed by the Library Evolution Working Group, see https://issues.isocpp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301

from networking-ts.