DConf 2013 Day 1 Talk 2 (Copy and Move Semantics)

[Walter Bright]

On 5/12/2013 6:01 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Bartosz, Walter and I reached a similar design a few years ago. We just thought
> it complicates things too much for what it does.

I've been working in the background on a scheme that can infer uniqueness. The 
beauty of it is it will not require visible language changes - it's just that 
things that didn't compile before now will. It won't solve all the problems, but 
I'm hoping it'll solve enough that the rest will not be more than a minor annoyance.

For a trivial example,

     shared p = new int;

would work, as 'new int' would be inferred to be unique, and a unique pointer 
can be implicitly cast to immutable or shared. This plays to D's strength with 
function purity, transitive const/immutable/shared, attribute inference, etc.