structs, ~this(), this(this) and reference counting

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 18.02.2012 11:32, schrieb Sönke Ludwig:
> After implementing automatic reference counting for resource management
> and spending the last two days with trying to figure out where the
> crashes and leaks come from and write workarounds for the corresponding
> compiler bugs, I came to the conclusion that this approach is futile.
> The code base is too large, as is the number of patterns that lead to
> compiler bugs.
>
> Since the number of issues unusually high, instead of posting one bug
> report for each (posted two), I compiled a small test suite with a
> number of bug patterns that I discovered (and some working patterns).
> The list is probably not complete and I know that some cases that are OK
> in the test suite now failed for me in real code.
>
> Anyway, do you think it makes sense to post this test suite as a meta
> bug for reference counting (excluding phobos RefCounted), so that
> somebody can look into it as a whole?
>
> I get the feeling that otherwise it might take a very long time until
> everything is stable in this area - and IMO this is an extremely
> important area for anyone who needs to (partially or fully) avoid the
> GC. And, last but not least, just like linker crashes and ICEs, it may
> cause a very fragile impression for anyone who encounters this.
>
> Test suite: http://pastebin.com/niZwRKpc
> (Run with "dmd -g -run" or "dmd -g -version=BAILOUT -run")
>

You did not implement the assignment operator for your refcounted 
struct. If you do that it should heavily reduce the number of issues you 
have. I actually only run into 1 severe issue with refcounting and that 
is that array slice copying does not call any copy constructor / 
assignment operator