Why do immutable variables need reference counting?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 08:39:17AM -0700, Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On 4/12/22 21:34, Salih Dincer wrote:
> 
> > I tried the following and I didn't understand one thing: Why is
> > there no need to use dup when slicing?
[...]

Because of two things: (1) there is a GC, and (2) characters in a string
are immutable.

Without (1), you will end up with either a memory leak or a dangling
pointer; without (2), your slice may randomly mutate when you don't
expect it to.


T

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