delete and references?

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-08 09:17:28 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> Great description.
> 
> FWIW, I am trying to convince Walter to not reclaim memory in delete, 
> but instead only call destructors. D continues C++'s mistake of 
> conflating lifetime termination with memory reclamation.

I don't see how this changes anything. Instead of accessing a 
deallocated object, you'll access a finaized but not yet deallocated 
object. In both cases, it's a bug.

Wouldn't it be better to have a system to track unique pointers? If you 
knew that no other pointer points to a given object or memory block, 
you can finalize and deallocate it safely. In fact, the current 
semantics of a scope object assume that the programmer will not leave 
any dangling pointers at the end of the scope, so it's already assuming 
uniqueness, just not enforcing it.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/