If I had my way

[Paulo Pinto]

Would this then be the shared_ptr<>/weak_ptr<> in D?

Am 11.12.2011 17:21, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
> On 12/11/11 9:14 AM, Chad J wrote:
>> On 12/11/2011 08:15 AM, maarten van damme wrote:
>>> ...
>>>
>>> I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D
>>> should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to
>>> control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a
>>> systems programming language, should also be able to be used without GC.
>>> I don't mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime
>>> should be compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it
>>> usable without GC.
>>>
>>> There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly
>>> slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that.
>>> Right now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the
>>> memory stays :p)
>>> Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If
>>> they don't like it, they can turn it off.
>>
>> I think one thing that could would be (optional) reference counting for
>> transitively atomic types. Of course, this is just another kind of
>> garbage collection, but it is /deterministic/ and parallelizes well, and
>> I bet this would open up a large amount of Phobos while the
>> stop-the-world collector is offline, and with little or no code change.
>
> I think the language has enough (in theory) and nearly enough (in
> practice) expressiveness to implement reference counted classes in a
> library, virtually transparently. I mean one could define a template
> RefCounted (an extended version of what's now in std) such that this
> pattern is possible:
>
> // client code
> class WidgetImpl {
> ...
> }
>
> alias RefCounted!WidgetImpl Widget;
>
> Aside from using WidgetImpl in type relationships, using Widget would
> transparently insert the appropriate reference counting without
> otherwise interfering with normal WidgetImpl semantics.
>
>
> Andrei