Escape analysis

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Steven Schveighoffer
<schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> "Walter Bright" wrote
>> Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> I think the cost/benefit of this could probably be argued either way.
>>> I've never encountered a bug related to this, for example, so to me the
>>> benefit is entirely theoretical while the cost is immediate.
>>
>> I have. Not often in my own code because I am very careful to avoid it,
>> but it frequently happens in 'bug' reports I get sent. This trap does
>> happen to programmers who are less familiar with how the underlying stack
>> machine actually works.
>>
>> The real problem is there is no way to verify that this isn't happening in
>> some arbitrarily large code base. I strongly believe that it is good for D
>> and for programming languages in general to work towards a design that can
>> provably eliminate certain types of bugs.
>
> I agree with this.  It would be nice to be able to flag these kinds of
> things.  Even if it was a warning and not a true error.  Just not a solution
> which silently allocates data that shouldn't be allocated.


Ok, I think we're completely on the same page here.  I'm for the
compiler finding bugs.  But I'm not for the compiler being
conservative and allocating memory when it doesn't have to, as it does
currently.

--bb