> Sometimes those checks are elided, and so it's exactly the same. Sometimes they're not.
This is something I've personally thought about a lot and I have no idea how I'd actually want it implemented either on the backend or in the syntax, but I think it'd be useful to have some way to say "I want these bound checks to be elided, if they can't be then make that an error". Similar to how you'd decorate a pure function in other languages to say that it can't cause side effects or depend on side effects for what it's doing.
I think that's probably a high level ask that's probably significantly more difficult that it seems initially too.
Quite possibly that's what would work. I haven't tried any of them in any kind of serious capacity before.
Edit: Looks like there's been an RFC in the past to add it to rust, but it got punted because the const generics stuff went in first and they wanted to see how that would shake out before trying to fully tackle this. https://github.com/ticki/rfcs/blob/pi-types-ext-2/text/0000-...
Note that ATS has a limited version of dependent types as compared to Idris/Agda/Coq/etc. As I understand it, you can't run arbitrary (recursive, etc) functions at the type level. But even this 'lite' version lets you express preconditions like "n is a multiple of 4" or "the source array and destination array must not overlap in memory".
This is something I've personally thought about a lot and I have no idea how I'd actually want it implemented either on the backend or in the syntax, but I think it'd be useful to have some way to say "I want these bound checks to be elided, if they can't be then make that an error". Similar to how you'd decorate a pure function in other languages to say that it can't cause side effects or depend on side effects for what it's doing.
I think that's probably a high level ask that's probably significantly more difficult that it seems initially too.