Our Sister

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 27 May 2016 at 21:51:59 UTC, Seb wrote:
> not if [] would be ref-counted too ;-)

That would be kinda horrible. Right now, slicing is virtually 
free and compatible with all kinds of backing schemes. If it 
became refcounted, it'd:

1) have to keep a pointer to the refcount structure with the 
slice, adding memory cost

2) make assignments and slicing work through that refcount 
pointer, adding cpu cost

3) somehow need to know the appropriate freeing strategy, adding 
some kind of indirect call when refcount = 0, and would make 
creating a slice more tedious as you'd need to know this (meaning 
you also probably need to allocate this structure! no more free 
ptr[0 .. length] operation on malloc'd blocks.)


So I'd be pretty strongly against that.