Something needs to happen with shared, and soon.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, November 15, 2012 03:51:13 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> I have no idea what we want to do about this situation though. Regardless of
> what we do with memory barriers and the like, it has no impact on whether
> casts are required. And I think that introducing the shared equivalent of
> const would be a huge mistake, because then most code would end up being
> written using that attribute, meaning that all code essentially has to be
> treated as shared from the standpoint of compiler optimizations. It would
> almost be the same as making everything shared by default again. So, as far
> as I can see, casting is what we're forced to do.

Actually, I think that what it comes down to is that shared works nicely when 
you have a type which is designed to be shared, and it encapsulates everything 
that it needs. Where it starts requiring casting is when you need to pass it 
to other stuff.

- Jonathan M Davis