lame question

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 4/19/11 1:04 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> And one other note -- delete will eventually be deprecated.  In order to
>> free memory, you must use clear and GC.free.
>
>> -Steve
>
> Well, why? It seems like a bad decision to me.

The feature is not going away, just the keyword.

"delete" is a gratuitous carryover from C++, which had to invent it 
because the need for manual object disposal predated the introduction of 
templates.

D stays a systems programming language but also has a safe subset and 
generally offers better safety guarantees than C++. It is excessive to 
allocate a keyword to a feature that's fundamentally unsafe, 
particularly since the underlying feature offers considerably fewer 
guarantees than its C++ counterpart. (Some GCs are unable to implement 
"delete" meaningfully.)

Manual memory disposal for the GC heap will be implemented as a template 
function with semantics defined by the GC implementation.



Andrei