A look at the D programming language by Ferdynand Górski

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Monday, 7 January 2013 at 21:49:12 UTC, Phil Lavoie wrote:
> Or the global one he uses?

Both actually, iirc. delete foo; is discouraged in favor of a 
library function destroy(foo) (or something, the name has changed 
once), and the class allocators can be done at the creation site 
(std.typecons has functions like emplace or Scoped) or with 
static methods and private constructors.

> Personally, I would like the delete operator to continue to 
> exist, just to explicitly delete objects when needed (although 
> scope objects works fine in most cases).

Bah, I'd like to get rid of both new and delete, replacing both 
with simple library functions. Well, probably not "get rid of" 
because that'd break too much code, but certainly discourage in 
favor of library function templates.

A benefit there is you could swap out to other things without 
changing the syntax, and it can return special library types.

import gc;
auto foo = New!Foo(); // could return a NotNull!Foo, which is 
substitutable for plain Foo, but also gives the guarantee that it 
isn't null

or
import malloc;
auto foo = New!Foo(); // could return RefCounted!Foo or whatever




Another benefit with all library is it'd clear up the delete 
deprecation... since new is just a library function, there'd be 
no confusion about delete being a library function either :)