More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/11/2014 1:43 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
> It is a variation on that scheme, but with one significant difference: those two
> pointer types can mix and there's no restriction on assignments from one type to
> the other. There's therefore no transitive effect and no complicated ownership
> rule to understand.
>
> This obviously does not address all your concerns with ARC (which I'll admit
> most are valid), but this "ARC isn't memory-safe" argument has to stop. It does
> not make sense. One doesn't need to sacrifice memory safety to use ARC, neither
> is that sacrifice necessary for having islands of non-ARC code. That's what I
> was trying to point out in my previous post.

As long as C++/CX and O-C are brought out here as proven, successful examples 
for D to emulate here, and there is no acknowledgement that they are not 
remotely memory safe, I need to continue to point this out.

Rust is memory safe, but is an unproven design.

Your proposal still relies on a GC to provide the memory safety, and has no 
inherent protection against GC pauses. Your idea has a lot of merit, but it is a 
hybrid ARC/GC system.