Opportunities for D

[Sean Kelly via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 9 July 2014 at 21:47:47 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 7/9/14, 1:51 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 7/9/2014 1:35 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Hmmm... how about using u after that?
>>
>> Using u after that would either cause an exception to be 
>> thrown, or
>> they'd get T.init as a value. I tend to favor the latter, but 
>> of course
>> those decisions would have to be made as part of the design of 
>> Unique.
>
> That semantics would reenact the auto_ptr disaster so probably 
> wouldn't be a good choice. -- Andrei

The problem with auto_ptr is that people rarely used it for what 
it was designed for.  Probably because it was the only smart 
pointer in the STL.  As I'm sure you're aware, the purpose of 
auto_ptr is to explicitly define ownership transfer of heap data. 
  For that it's pretty much perfect, and I use it extensively.  It 
looks like unique_ptr is pretty much the same, but with a 
facelift.  Underneath it still performs destructive copies, 
unless I've misread the docs.