Reference Counting Template
dsimcha
dsimcha at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 13 11:12:33 PST 2009
I'm starting to think it would be both useful and feasible to have a general
reference counting template struct in Phobos:
struct RefCounted(T, alias onZero) {
// Implementation
}
Basically, you would provide it with a type T that it's supposed to count
references to and an action (a function that takes a T and returns void)
that's supposed to happen when the amount of references drop to zero.
Reference counting is a pretty useful general technique for managing resources
that can't have cycles and I think it makes sense to have a generic template
for it instead of having people reimplement the same code over and over for
file handles, large arrays of primitives that they allocate on the C heap and
want freed deterministically, database connections, etc. Does this sound
worthwhile?
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