D/Objective-C, extern (Objective-C)

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-06-25 18:06:33 +0000, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> said:

> On 6/24/2013 1:18 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
>> And I don't think it is very common in D either. Either way, if D was to
>> implement ARC for its own memory allocator instead of the current GC (which
>> would be great) there's noting to prevent implementing it so that reference
>> counts could be incremented from the middle address of a memory block, it'd be
>> quite easy in fact, and quite necessary too because of the way arrays work.
> 
> From my reading about ARC, it seems to me that we should support it now 
> rather than later because:
> 
> 1. people will expect it of D
> 
> 2. non-ARC is inherently unsafe
> 
> 3. migrating non-ARC code to ARC is error-prone and a major nuisance
> 
> 4. non-O-C programs can also benefit from ARC (after all, reliance on 
> the GC is the perennial dealbreaker for people wanting to migrate high 
> performance code to D)

Exactly. Even without support for Objective-C, ARC in D is a very 
desirable feature. Beside that, the C++/COM WinRT API also uses ARC 
now, so I'd say it's becoming a must have pretty quickly.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/