The "no gc" crowd

[Sean Kelly]

On Oct 10, 2013, at 10:23 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 09/10/13 06:25, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> The way I see it we must devise a robust solution to that, NOT consider the
>> state of the art immutable (heh, a pun).
> 
> Must say I have had a miserable experience with immutability and any kind of complex data structure, particularly when concurrency is involved.

As long as the reference itself can be reassigned (tail-immutable, I suppose) I think immutable is occasionally quite useful for complex data structures.  It basically formalizes the RCU (read-copy-update) approach to wait-free concurrency.  I'd tend to use this most often for global data structures built up on app start, and updated rarely to never as the program runs.