std.container and classes

[foobar]

On Wednesday, 21 December 2011 at 07:30:45 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> And if they're classes and not managed by the GC nor in a 
> struct which manages their lifetime, how are they going to be 
> freed? Does the user have to explicitly free them themselves? 
> How is that better than using a ref-counted struct?
>

Memory management should be the responsibility of the allocator 
and it shouldn't be limited only to a single policy of 
ref-counting which has many disadvantages.

> And no, using reference semantics does _not_ require classes. A 
> class is just the easiest way to get reference semantics. It 
> doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best way. That depends 
> on the context.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I didn't use the word 'require' anywhere, but it is indeed by far 
the simplest and best way to define a ref-type. All I'm saying is 
that when travelling from NYC to Washington DC through China, you 
really should have good reasons to not use the direct route.