Convert IVectorView to std::span

Question

winrt::hstring is convertible to std::basic_string_view which comes in handy quite often. However, I am unable to do the same for IVectorView.

Looking at the interface of IVector , I imagine you would have to convert it back to the underlying implementation type so I tried

using impl_type = winrt::impl::vector_impl<float, std::vector<float>, winrt::impl::single_threaded_collection_base>;
winrt::Windows::Foundation::Collections::IVectorView vector_view = GetIVectorView();
auto& impl = *winrt::get_self<impl_type>(vector_view);
auto& container = impl.get_container();

which compiles but container.size() is 0 which is incorrect.

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Edit:

vector_view was the result of the TensorFloat.GetAsVectorView Method. So I can solve my problem by using the TensorFloat.CreateReference Method to get a IMemoryBufferReference instead of a IVectorView .

However, I'd still like to know whether IVectorView can be converted to a std::span, if not why is this not allowed.

Answer 1

The IVector and IVectorView interfaces are specifically designed not to expose the underlying contiguous memory, probably to support cases where there is no underlying contiguous memory or the implementation language doesn't expose it as such (javascript??).

You probably could get back the implementation type in when you know cppwinrt provides the implementation, however I'm my case there is no possible way of knowing the implemention type. In any case, it's inadvisable to do this.

In my case it would have been better if TensorFloat.GetAsVectorView did not exist so I could find TensorFloat.CreateReference .

Also it would be nice if cppwinrt made themselves range-v3 compatible. But until the most advisable thing to do is just copy to a std::vector.