Reference counting with fat pointers

[IGotD-]

On Saturday, 26 July 2014 at 10:49:25 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
>
> Interesting proposal. It seems that you want to change the 
> default for pointers in D, but Walter will probably not like 
> that ;-). But I wonder how much language support this actually 
> needs, much of it seems implementable with templates, which is 
> probably much more acceptable.
>

We should not change the default behaviour of the pointers in D. 
However, we can add a fat pointer type, Let's say

int^ p = new int;

That would have zero breaking changes. I would even take further 
and allow several types of fat pointers in order to have allow 
several different types of fat pointers.

int^(RefCounted) = new int;

What happens if.

auto p = new int;

Well, in order not to break anything we have make p an int*.

Fat pointers are obviously needed but nothing happens. Why?