PackedStringArray missing methods about godot HOT 6 OPEN

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Is this not a bug, or are Packed Arrays not supposed to be a better version of the normal Array?

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They're designed to be tighter and more performant storage, not a plain superior version, implementing these features would require writing new dedicated methods for them, as they do not exist in the underlying type, unlike Array, see here

So this isn't a missing intended feature, but something that can be discussed as an improvement

from godot.

The Packed*Array types are primarily designed to do two things:

• Store data efficiently, by not storing Variant but the real data type
• Pass data back and forth between scripting and the engine, especially for servers, in a way that avoids having to constantly convert between Array and what ever specific data type is required

Internally they just use an engine data type called Vector, which lacks a lot of the features Array does, the special methods in PackedByteArray for example is only available to scripting on PackedByteArray and are implemented in the bindings, not on the Vector<uint8_t> type itself. The same would likely have to be done for the suggested methods, as they would not be very relevant to Vector itself as we don't use those methods in the engine core

The one exception really would be sort_custom which already exists, but it'd have to be bound in a custom way as the built-in one doesn't take a Callable but a comparator

Further the pop methods have been suggested before but can't be trivially implemented, as they'd be unable to return a value, unlike Array where they can return Variant() there's no way really to return clearly a null for int for example. There'd be questions if pop_back/front/at should crash or not when the container is empty etc (like general access does with Vector). See:

• #83000

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