How can I create an inline array inside a struct?

[Jens Alfke]

I want to define a struct that contains a fixed-size blob of data — for example, a SHA-1 digest, which is 20 bytes long. Is there any way to define this in Swift such that the data lives in the struct, instead of being a separate heap block?

In other words, I want the Swift equivalent of

typedef struct {

char bytes[20];

} SHA1Digest;

I couldn’t find anything in either official Swift book about working with C arrays. The closest thing is the section “Pointers” in Using Swift With Cocoa, but it only seems to talk about calling other Swift code.

As far as I can tell, to get a block of n bytes (where n is known at compile time) I have to use an Array. Which implies creating a separate internal object to store the array contents. This isn’t very inefficient if I only have a couple of these, but if I’ve got millions of them, or need to process them at a very high rate (i.e. in some numeric or crypto code) it can be a big bottleneck — this is the sort of reason why people fall back to C or C++ when doing computation-intensive code.

Go can handle this just fine (a fixed-size array, as opposed to a slice, needn’t be heap-allocated, and is copied by value) and I was imagining Swift could too, until I tried to create such a thing today and got stuck.

—Jens

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

A tuple is fixed-size and usually inline. (And, in fact, that's how that struct would be translated into Swift!) You can't index into a tuple with an integer, of course, but if you're willing to write a giant switch statement or something to do that, that might do the trick.

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[Jens Alfke]

On Jun 15, 2015, at 4:13 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon <br...@brentdax.com> wrote:

A tuple is fixed-size and usually inline. (And, in fact, that's how that struct would be translated into Swift!) You can't index into a tuple with an integer, of course, but if you're willing to write a giant switch statement or something to do that, that might do the trick.

Indexing doesn’t matter; these values are basically opaque blobs, they just need to be handed to/from the underlying APIs like CC_SHA1( ). So the question is, can I in Swift get the address of such a tuple as an UnsafeMutablePointer?

—Jens

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

Playgrounds are acting up for me right now, but you can pass a tuple to withUnsafeMutablePointer...