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2017-01-08COMMON: Add Span to common libraryColin Snover
Span is roughly modelled on the GSL span<T> type, and is intended to replace direct access to raw pointers -- especially pointers that are passed to functions along with a separate size parameter. It provides low-cost bounds-checked reads and writes, as well as convenience functions for reading common values (integers of varying endianness, strings, etc.). While similar to MemoryReadStream in purpose, Span is superior in cases where memory is writable, where memory is accessed randomly rather than sequentially, or where any invalid access should be treated as an unrecoverable error. It should also be more efficient than a MemoryReadStream because it is implemented using CRTP, so there is no runtime overhead from dynamic dispatch. NamedSpan is an extension of Span which provides enhanced debugging information when out-of-bounds memory accesses occur. It allows programmers to name the memory span at construction time, and it also tracks the offsets of subspans so that the absolute byte offset of the original memory can be provided in the error message if an out-of-bounds access occurs. SpanOwner is similar to ScopedPtr but has awareness of the design of Span objects, so allows the memory pointed to by the Span object inside the SpanOwner to be freed when the SpanOwner is freed without requiring holding a separate pointer to the start of memory. It also provides some copy semantics, so unlike a ScopedPtr, SpanOwners can be held by objects in movable containers like Common::Array -- but note that because there are no move semantics in C++98, this means that a new, complete memory copy of the pointed-to data will be created, rather than just a new Span pointing to the same block of memory, when a container holding a SpanOwner expands.