poll about delete

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Kagamin wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
> 
>> - Most code and most coders would be dramatically helped by 
>> distinguishing destruction from deletion, as opposed to the wrong 
>> conflation implicitly fostered by C++ for years.
> 
> So you just want to have control what you destruct and what you
> delete? For what reason?

This has been often discussed in numerous fora. Essentially destruction 
can be made safe but memory reclamation cannot (with qualifications).

>> - D is a systems language, but it's also a language in which doing
>> the right thing is easy and favored. Allocating no less than a
>> keyword for a fundamentally unsafe operation is just too much.
> 
> The language can't guarantee it's unsafety. You can tell whether an
> object's destructor was called, but you can't tell whether a memory
> chunk was freed.

I'm not sure where this leaves the conversation.

>> - The GC can't be expected to implement manual disposal anyway.
> 
> This expectation is not easy to verify. If you want GC to not free,
> why you bother if it doesn't free?

I bother about primitives that essentially can't guarantee anything.

>> allocating a _keyword_ for an operation that may actually end up
>> not doing much at all is overkill.
> 
> This seems to be the only argument that's hard to object to, and it
> seems to be the main one. So is that it?

Plus all others, none of which was successfully retorted.

>> Honestly the top thing I'm worried right now is Walter's aversion
>> to breaking changes, which has turned an elbow since TDPL.
> 
> I doubt that keyword saving is a good argument for a breaking change.
> 
> 
> btw can a function destruct object and nullify pointer for both
> rvalue and lvalue?

It doesn't matter. delete nullifying its argument was a false sense of 
safety anyway - like the helmet of a kamikaze.


Andrei