Make references more user friendly in Rust about flatdata HOT 3 CLOSED

Rust has the problem that all of flatdata's references are strongly types

I think this is also a huge benefit. :)

About implementation. Since there is no overloading, I guess you want to templatize? I implemented this feature by using num-trait::ToPrimitive (https://github.com/heremaps/flatdata/tree/boxdot/varbit-indexing), however now I am not sure it is a good idea. Rust uses usize everywhere, and even at, slice, substring are more ergonomic, all other methods in Rust like skip, take, nth, etc... are still enforcing to use usize. I guess this is just the idiomatic way to go.

Another way would be to introduce unsized type in flatdata like usize.

from flatdata.

File formats need fixed sizes, I would not add usize/isize to the flatdata grammar.

from flatdata.

Closing since we moved to native slices

from flatdata.