Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Dicebot]

On Wednesday, 5 February 2014 at 00:47:27 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 2/4/2014 2:39 PM, Dicebot wrote:
>> Also non-nullable types should be implicitly cast to nullable 
>> parameters so you
>> don't always need to support all cases distinctively.
>
> The difficulty comes when needing to transfer the nullability 
> of the argument to the nullability of the return type. Implicit 
> conversions don't help with that.
>
> See inout.

Why can't inout be used for that as well? Same for pure & co.

In my opinion "inout" should be simply generic placeholder saying 
"allow only code that works for all possible qualifiers and 
preserve those in return type".

But nature of nullable is such that you rarely want to transfer 
it. Is can be useful as return type sometimes but when you pass 
it around and process it you almost always want it to be 
non-nullable. There is no practical benefit in trying to provide 
all-allowing API's.