Documenting vectors

[signorecello]

closes #231

Even to me, it's confusing the whole Array/Slices/Vector thing, but @critesjosh you're telling me that with the --experimental-ssa all slice methods will be array methods, maybe it would help with this?

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[critesjosh]

I am not sure that all slice methods are array methods when using the flag. But I was chatting with @vezenovm and he said that once the experimental-ssa flag is the default, this will be the case. I am not sure if there are other changes that will be in the 0.9.0 release that will make this happen.

[Savio-Sou]

it's confusing the whole Array/Slices/Vector thing

How I understand it is:

• Arrays are, well, arrays.
• Tuples are multi-type compatible arrays.
• Slices are dynamically-sized arrays.
• Vectors are mutable slices.

Rust often offers a wide set of possible nuances for devs to pick the best option for quick development vs safety & optimizations.

Hope it helps and happy to be corrected 🙌

[vezenovm]

Hey @critesjosh @signorecello so after this PR: noir-lang/noir#2070, arrays and slices no longer have a subtyping relationship. On Noir master you will see that the array methods and slice methods are now separated again in the stdlib. There is now an as_slice method to convert an array into a slice.

This isn't a breaking change though as we automatically coerce arrays to slices in the compiler when needed. Here is a simple example:

fn foo(slice: [Field]) -> comptime Field {
  slice.len();
}

fn bar() {
 let arr = [0; 5];
 assert(foo(arr) == 5);
}

Apologies for the back-and-forth here, but removing the subtype relationship between slices and arrays was deemed the best solution as it solved some other issues for us.