More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[bearophile via Digitalmars-d]

Walter Bright:

> Actually, I think inference of the ability to implicitly and 
> safely convert from mutable to immutable or shared to be very 
> powerful. I also think it is superior than requiring the user 
> to add ever more annotations, which some research (and my 
> experience) shows that users are reluctant to do.

I agree the people are reluctant to add annotations, but I think 
it's also depends on the return of investment of the specific 
annotation. I am annotating all my code carefully with "pure", 
but the ROI of all those purity annotations is not great.

And I agree the piling of special cases is a not clean design. 
It's now simpler to ask the compiler if a certain assignment to 
immutable is allowed or not. Because I can't remember the 
supported cases.

So I suggest a more principled and visible approach at the 
problem of ownership and uniqueness.

Bye,
bearophile