More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 2 May 2014 at 15:06:59 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 5/2/14, 3:09 AM, "Marc Schütz" <schuetzm at gmx.net>" wrote:
>> On Thursday, 1 May 2014 at 22:23:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
>> Digitalmars-d
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 03:10:04PM -0700, Walter Bright via
>>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>>> The thing is, GC is a terrible and unreliable method of 
>>>> managing
>>>> non-memory resource lifetimes. Destructors for GC objects 
>>>> are not
>>>> guaranteed to ever run. If you do have struct with a 
>>>> destructor as a
>>>> field in a class, you've got, at minimum, suspicious code 
>>>> and a latent
>>>> bug.
>>>
>>> Exactly!!! This is why I said we should ban the use of 
>>> structs with
>>> dtors as a field in a class.
>>
>> No, not in a class, but in any GC-managed object. It's 
>> unfortunate that
>> class currently implies GC.
>
> So now it looks like dynamic arrays also can't contain structs 
> with destructors :o). -- Andrei

Well, that would be the logical consequence...

But my main point was actually this:
Don't disallow destructors on classes just because they are 
classes, but disallow them when they are not guaranteed to be 
called (or calling them is troublesome because of 
multi-threading), i.e. GC.