More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[ponce via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 30 April 2014 at 20:21:33 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
>
> First off, we're considering eliminating destructor calls from 
> within the GC entirely. It makes for a faster and better GC, 
> but the real reason here is that destructors are 
> philosophically bankrupt in a GC environment. I think there's 
> no need to argue that in this community. The GC never 
> guarantees calling destructors even today, so this decision 
> would be just a point in the definition space (albeit an 
> extreme one).
>
> That means classes that need cleanup (either directly or by 
> having fields that are structs with destructors) would need to 
> garner that by other means, such as reference counting or 
> manual. We're considering deprecating ~this() for classes in 
> the future.
>

I'm all for it, this will break code that was not correct in the 
first place, and was working by accident.

Also, being called by the GC from any thread prevent many kinds 
of cleanup, such as those with a thread-wise bound context (CUDA, 
OpenGL, etc...).