I don't think you are loading the whole array, but until pointers are resolved it's not obvious. Without this runtime arrays are useless.

I don't think you are loading the whole array, but until pointers are resolved it's not obvious. Without this runtime arrays are useless.

For the non-array case:

[[block]] struct A {
  x : array<u32, 4>;
};
var<storage> v : [[access(read_write)]] A;
void main() {
  const a : u32 = v.a[0];
  // ...
}

If v.a[0] loads the whole array then many extra data races would be introduced.

Agree with @alan-baker . The relevant spec text doesn't mention OpLoad anywhere, it's up to the implementation to figure out when to do this right now, isn't it? And yes, we need proper pointer semantics.

Superceded/fixed by #1619