Bounds checking

The @boundscheck(...) macro marks blocks of code that perform bounds checking. When such blocks are inlined into an @inbounds(...) block, the compiler may remove these blocks. The compiler removes the @boundscheck block only if it is inlined into the calling function. For example, you might write the method sum as:

With a custom array-like type MyArray having:

Then when getindex is inlined into sum, the call to checkbounds(A,i) will be elided. If your function contains multiple layers of inlining, only @boundscheck blocks at most one level of inlining deeper are eliminated. The rule prevents unintended changes in program behavior from code further up the stack.

There may be certain scenarios where for code-organization reasons you want more than one layer between the @inbounds and @boundscheck declarations. For instance, the default getindex methods have the chain calls getindex(IndexStyle(A), A, i) calls _getindex(::IndexLinear, A, i).

The overall hierarchy is:

checkbounds(A, I...) throws an error if the indices are invalid, whereas checkbounds(Bool, A, I...) returns in that circumstance. checkbounds_indices discards any information about the array other than its axes tuple, and performs a pure indices-vs-indices comparison: this allows relatively few compiled methods to serve a huge variety of array types. Indices are specified as tuples, and are usually compared in a 1-1 fashion with individual dimensions handled by calling another important function, checkindex: typically,

so checkindex checks a single dimension. All of these functions, including the unexported checkbounds_indices have docstrings accessible with ? .

If you have to customize bounds checking for a specific array type, you should specialize checkbounds(Bool, A, I...). However, in most cases you should be able to rely on checkbounds_indices as long as you supply useful axes for your array type.

If you have novel index types, first consider specializing checkindex, which handles a single index for a particular dimension of an array. If you have a custom multidimensional index type (similar to CartesianIndex), then you may have to consider specializing checkbounds_indices.