Future of D 2.x as stable/bug fix, and what's next for D 3.x
bachmeier
no at spam.net
Wed Sep 2 14:09:12 UTC 2020
On Wednesday, 2 September 2020 at 09:06:16 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> Either a language is garbage collected which means the
> runtime/compiler takes care of the memory management or it has
> manual memory management. Supporting both is in my opinion not
> realistic because designing libraries than can work in any
> environment is too complicated. This is an active choice that
> the library author must take if automatic memory management
> should be used or not.
But we program in these mixed environments all the time. Garbage
collected languages call into C libraries.
Here's how it can work without being complicated, based roughly
on my experience with other languages: @nogc library functions
can call only std.nogc and other library functions marked @nogc.
Any data passed into a @nogc function is protected from being
garbage collected. You can use the GC to allocate data in @nogc
functions, but only if it's returned to a call that was made from
non- at nogc code.
It would require std.nogc but that wouldn't be a monumental task,
because you don't need to replicate the full functionality of
Phobos, and big parts are already nogc. You'd just need to insert
a few restrictions that we already have when doing mixed-language
programming.
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