RAII is misleading

[bitwise via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 18:22:12 UTC, duff wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 17:03:47 UTC, bitwise wrote:
>> Then, during recursive serialization, if you found an object 
>> which was already in the table, you wouldn't serialize it 
>> again.
>
> But this doesn't give the guarentee that the real citizen who 
> responsible to tell the client "hey i've got the ref" can do 
> it. With RC, the real owner may not know that his resource is 
> stolen by a children.

The way that I was dealing with this at the time was requesting 
resources(files) from a shared repository by name. The repository 
would either load the file and instantiate the appropriate 
object, or return the object if it already existed. So, no node 
in the graph ever really owned a resource. All resources were 
owned by one central repository. Now, this was only enforced by 
convention, so I suppose someone could call delete on the 
shared_ptr's internal pointer, but making this strictly enforced 
through language features is difficult, if at all possible 
without major comprimises.

There is some discussion about this idea in the dlang Study 
forum. They're trying to figure out how to implement ref counting 
in D in a totally @safe way(impossible to currupt memory). I 
think that some major comprimises will have to be made, and I 
personally wohld rather deal with this issue through good coding 
conventions.

    Bit