Ruling out arbitrary cost copy construction?

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-10-06 12:34:54 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> 2. It would force certain types (such as BigInt) that allocate 
> resources and have value semantics to resort to reference counting.

Also, before asking for more reference counting, perhaps you should 
check that bug and find a nice way to do reference counting correctly 
with no race conditions (unlike what's done in Phobos currently).
<http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4624>

The most problematic thing with reference-counted memory is that the GC 
can call your struct's destructor from any thread which can cause 
low-level races if the reference counter isn't manipulated with atomic 
operations. And atomic operations slow things down, are you sure you 
want to force this in BigInt?

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