Prototype of Ownership/Borrowing System for D

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Wed Nov 20 22:15:18 UTC 2019


On 11/20/2019 5:51 AM, rikki cattermole wrote:
> If this is the case then perhaps making all pointers non-null 
> (with asserts) would make sense.

I originally was going to add null to the data flow analysis. But I realized it 
would be rather useless:

   T* foo();

   T* p = foo(); // is p null or not?

Very quickly, the flow analysis would drop into "dunno if it is null or not" so 
it just won't be worth much.

In order to make non-null checking actually work, the language semantics would 
likely need to change to make:

    T*    a non-null pointer
    T?*   an optionally null pointer

or something like that. Two different pointer types would need to exist.

Something like this is orthogonal to what @live is trying to do, so I put it on 
the shelf for the time being.


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