D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[deadalnix]

On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 23:42:22 UTC, Manu wrote:
> I've always steered away from things like this because it 
> creates a
> double-indirection.
> I have thought of making a similar RefCounted template, but 
> where the
> refCount is stored in a hash table, and the pointer is used to 
> index the
> table.
> This means the refCount doesn't pollute the class/structure 
> being
> ref-counted, or avoids a double-indirection on general access.
> It will be slightly slower to inc/decrement, but that's a 
> controlled
> operation.
> I would use a system like this for probably 80% of resources.
>

Reference counting also tend to create die in mass effect 
(objects tends to die in cluster) and freeze program for a while. 
I'm not sure it is that better (better than current D's GC for 
sure, but I'm not sure it is better than a good GC). It probably 
depends on the usage pattern.