Heisenbug involving Destructors & GC - Help Needed

[Etienne via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 30 June 2015 at 13:01:46 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 6/26/15 11:38 PM, Brian Schott wrote:
>> On Saturday, 27 June 2015 at 03:16:35 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
>>> calling destroy on a pointer should either be fixed or be an 
>>> error,
>>> that should not be allowed to happen.
>>
>> Completely agreed. Calling destroy() on a pointer has been 
>> incorrect
>> EVERY time I've seen it done.
>
> I'd say if you want to see cases where it was done correctly, 
> change the behavior and watch the complaints come in ;)
>
> Wouldn't destroying the pointer target make an assumption about 
> ownership?
>
> Consider a struct that contains a pointer:
>
> struct S
> {
>    T *x;
> }
>
> destroy's algorithm for this struct is to call destroy on all 
> of the members, then set to S.init. But what if S is just 
> *referencing* that T, and doesn't *own* it? Isn't this the 
> wrong thing to do?
>
> I agree it's inconsistent with class references. How to make it 
> consistent isn't as easy to decide. For me, it's the class 
> destruction which is incorrect. Consider that destroy is 
> consistent with scope destruction for every type except for 
> classes:
>
> class C {}
> struct S {}
>
> {
>    C c = new C;
>    S s;
>    S *s2 = new S;
> } // calls s.dtor, does not call c.dtor or s2.dtor
>
> And what about arrays? Should calling destroy on an array call 
> destroy on all of the elements (it currently doesn't)?
>
> If I were to design destroy from scratch, I'd make destroy, and 
> destroyRef (which destroys referenced data via pointer or 
> class).
>
> -Steve

I don't think there's a problem with destroy in the first place. 
The problem is that it's being advertised as calling the 
destructors:

http://dlang.org/library/object/type_info.destroy.html
http://dlang.org/library/object/destroy.html

The function would need a documentation section itself, since 
it's being advertised as a replacement for `delete` and expected 
to do the same wherever there's something to read about it.