Swift pointer from ArraySlice

Question

I'm trying to determine the "Swift-y" way of creating my own contiguous memory containers (in my particular case, I'm building n-dimensional arrays). I want my containers to be as close to Swift's builtin Array as possible - in terms of functionality and usability.

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I need to access the pointer to memory of my containers for stuff like Accelerate and BLAS operations.

I want to know whether an ArraySlice's pointer would point to the first element of the slice, or the first element of its base.

When I tried to test UnsafePointer<Int>(array) == UnsafePointer<Int>(array[1...2]) it looks like Swift doesn't allow pointer construction from ArraySlices (or I just did it incorrectly).

I'm looking for advice on which way would be the most "Swift-y"?

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I understand that when slicing an array the follow is true:

let array = [1, 2, 3]
array[1] == array[1...2][1]

and

array[1...2][0] != 2 # index out of bounds error

In other words, indexing is always performed relative to the base Array.

Which suggests: that we should return a pointer to the base's first element. Because slices are relative to their base.

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However, iteration through a slice (obviously) only considers elements of that slice:

for i in array[1..2] # i takes on 2 followed by 3

Which suggests: that we should return a pointer to the slice's first element. Because slices have their own starting point.

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If my user wanted to operate on a slice in a BLAS operation it would be intuitive to expect:

mmul(matrix1[1...2, 0...1].pointer, matrix2[4...5, 0...1].pointer)

to point to the first elements of slice, but I don't know if this is the way a Swift ArraySlice would do things.

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My Question: Should a container slice object's pointer point to the first element of the slice, or, the first element of the base container.

Answer 1

This operation is unsafe:

UnsafePointer<Int>(array)

What you mean is:

array.withUnsafeBufferPointer { ... }

This applies to your types as well, and is the pattern you should employ to interoperate with BLAS and Accelerate. You should not try to use a pointer method IMO.

There is no promise that array will continue to exist by the time you actually access the pointer, even if that happens in the same line of code. ARC is free to destroy that memory shockingly quickly.

UnsafeBufferPointer is actually a very nice type in that it is already promised to be contiguous and it behaves as a Collection.

My suggestion here would be to manage your own memory internally, probably with a ManagedBuffer, but maybe just with a UnsafeMutablePointer that you alloc and destroy yourself. It's very important that you manage the layout of the data so that it's compatible with Accelerate. You don't want Array<Array<UInt8>>. That's going to add too much structure. You want a blob of bytes that you index into in the good-ol' C ways (row*width+column, etc). You probably don't want your slices to return pointers at all directly. Your mmul function is likely going to need special logic to understand how to pull the pieces it needs out of slices with minimal copying so that it works with vDSP_mmul. "Generic" and "Accelerate" seldom go together.

For example, considering this:

mmul(matrix1[1...2, 0...1].pointer, matrix2[4...5, 0...1].pointer)

(Obviously I assume your real matrices are dramatically larger; this kind of matrix doesn't make much sense to send to vDSP.)

You're going to have to write your own mmul here obviously since this memory isn't laid out correctly. So you might as well pass the slices. Then you'd do something like (totally untested, uncompiled, and I'm sure the syntax is wildly wrong):

mmul(m1: MatrixSlice, m2: MatrixSlice) -> Matrix {
 var s1 = UnsafeMutablePointer<Float>.alloc(m1.rows * m1.columns)
 // use vDSP_vgathr to copy each sliced row out of m1 into s1
 var s2 = UnsafeMutablePointer<Float>.alloc(m2.rows * m2.columns)
 // use vDSP_vgathr to copy each sliced row out of m2 into s2
 var result = UnsafeMutablePointer<Float>.alloc(m1.rows * m2.columns)
 vDSP_mmul(s1, 1, s2, 1, result, 1, m1.rows, m2.columns, m1.columns)
 s1.destroy()
 s2.destroy()
 // This will need to call result.move() or moveInitializeFrom or something
 return Matrix(result)
 }

I'm just throwing out stuff here, but this is probably the kind of structure you'd want.

To your underlying question about whether the pointer to the container or to the data is usually passed by Swift, the answer is unfortunately "magic" for Array and no one else. Passing an Array to something that wants a pointer will magically (by the compiler, not the stdlib) pass a pointer to the storage of the Array. No other type gets this magic. Not even ContiguousArray gets this magic. If you pass a ContiguousArray to something that wants a pointer, you'll pass the pointer to the container (and if it's mutable, corrupt the container; true story, hated that one...)

Answer 2

Thanks in part to @RobNapier the answer to my question is: ArraySlice's pointer should point to the slice's first element.

The way I verified this was simply:

var array = [5,4,3,325,67,7,3]
array.withUnsafeBufferPointer{ 0ドル } != array[3...6].withUnsafeBufferPointer{ 0ドル } # true
 ^--- points to 5's address ^--- points to 325's address