A: Hey yo, that function should only support up to 20 objects
B: Say no more fam

https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/...

Some code makes me want to cry.

Burn it.

Whosever responsible for it, too.

Nuke it from the orbit.

That seriously looks like someone unrolled a container-processing loop to save some CPU cycles.
But you normally only do it in high-performance low-level code where such micro optimizations still don't matter most of the time...

It's self aware

Dart doesn't support varargs so this is what that leads to. There is also hashList where you can use a container.

This is so wrong. This shouldn't exist.

@TheSilent but what's wrong with just a list? Even they say if you need more than 20 use a list. I don't know what varargs are but I feel like even if dart did support them, we'd still see this as the problem seems to be elsewhere.

@bananaerror variadic args.

A function that can take multiple values in usually a list style.

If you know bash / C / PHP:

argv and argc as a simple example.

argc is a counter containing how many values are passed,
argv is a numerical indexed array containing the values passed into the function.

Many different forms exist, but it boils down mostly to an array containing the values passed to the function.

@IntrusionCM Ahh thanks, so similar to C#'s "params" keyword then.

@bananaerror exactly

@bananaerror I guess it's an API design thing. Some people don't enjoy the extra syntax to create the list. So you have f(arg1, arg2, arg3) instead of f([arg1, arg2, arg3]). Basically just syntactic sugar/better to look at.

@TheSilent Yes. No. It's complicated.

Variadic arguments can support type hints.

Single arguments, too.

Lists are a tad more complicated - depending on language they can have a type, but most of the time they don't.

An object is always passed by reference, a lists behaviour depends on the language. The objects could be bound by reference - it becomes tricky. What happens e.g. when you manipulate the list in the function?

This is why variadic arguments are a tad different from passing in a regular list... It's not only syntax sugar, it usually "fixes" the corner cases.

If the language supports reflection, it becomes even more different. :)

@IntrusionCM My comment was referring to why they build the Api like that not an explanation for what varargs are ;) Sorry I didn't make that very clear. Thanks for the explanation anyways :)

@TheSilent Ah sorry. Brain got wrong context.

Lol, wtf.

This is why you need a fixed length array type that can be promoted to the stack and very short syntax for it.