dart_immutable becomes persistent (and a poll)

[Paul Brauner]

Hello,

The library hosted at http://code.google.com/p/dart-immutable/ used to be called 'dart_immutable/dart_immutable.dart'. It is now called 'persistent/persistent.dart'. Which means that if you were depending on it (I seriously doubt anyone's using it, but still :)) you now need to change dart_immutable into persistent in you pub dependencies and you imports in your .dart files. Moreover, the class ImmutableMap has been renamed into PersistentMap.

I'm changing its name for three reasons:

• I'll soon push it on pub.dartlang.org and as discussed previously on this mailing list, a dart_ prefix doesn't make sense there.
• The old ImmutableMap class name was clashing with the recently introduced ImmutableMap in the Dart SDK.
• Some people seem to read "immutable" as something along the lines of "const" while you can in fact insert, delete, etc. elements in a PersistentMap: it just returns a new one.

I'm using this occasion to announce that the implementation of  PersistentMap is now complete (except for hashCode), very fast (see map_bench.dart) and thoroughly tested. I think it's ready to be used for serious stuff, but I'm waiting library v2 to freeze the API, in case I can implement some interfaces.

Which leads me to the poll: would you rather write

1.

import 'package:persistent/persistent.dart';

...

new PersistentMap();

...

2.

import 'package:persistent/persistent.dart' as per;

...

new per.Map();

...

3. Other (in this case, what?)

I like 2. except that apart from Map and List, most of the classes that will live there won't clash with Dart's standard library. So it's maybe too  high a price to pay.

[Don Olmstead]

#1

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