Escaping the Tyranny of the GC: std.rcstring, first blood

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/15/14, 8:07 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>
>> Again, it's become obvious that a category of users will simply refuse
>> to use a GC, either for the right or the wrong reasons. We must make D
>> eminently usable for them.
>
> Is adding reference counted strings to D going to add a significant
> amount of complexity for the programmers?

Time will tell, but I don't think so.

> As usual your judgement is better than mine, but surely the increase in
> complexity of D language and its usage must be considered in this
> rcstring discussion. So far I have not seen this point discussed enough
> in this thread.

Increasing the standard library with good artifacts is important. So is 
making it more generic by (in this case) expanding the kinds of strings 
it supports.

> D is currently quite complex, so I prefer enhancements that simplify the
> code (like tuples), or that make it safer (this mostly means type system
> improvements, like eprovably correct tracking of memory areas and
> lifetimes, or stricter types for array indexes, or better means to
> detect errors at compile-times with more compile-time introspection for
> function/ctor arguments), or features that have a limited scope and
> don't increase the general code complexity much (like the partial type
> inference patch created by Kenji).

I think most people exclude the library when discussing the complexity 
of a language.


Andrei