Memory safety depends entirely on GC ?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 23 February 2015 at 14:56:11 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
> violation of the principle of separation of concerns: a 
> consumer shouldn't need to have information about the 
> management strategy, it should work equally with 
> `RefCounted!C`, `Unique!C` and bare (GC) `C`, as long as it 
> doesn't take ownership of the resource.

Just be aware that by not making the refcount part of C you 
either:

1. Need one more indirection.

2. Need a more complicated allocator to avoid alignment padding 
when C has 32byte/64 byte alignment requirements.

3. Risk having the refcount landing on a different cacheline, 
causing more cache misses.

If you do excessive refcounting (ARC) and care about performance 
you actually need to let the implementor of C decide where the 
RC_counter is embedded...