Ehem, ARM

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-11-15 12:53:18 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> said:

> On 2013-11-15 13:42, Michel Fortin wrote:
> 
>> Honestly, what I'd do is implement ARC for Objective-C types in the
>> compiler without waiting for Walter to decide on anything. There's
>> almost nothing to decide when it comes to how D/Objective-C does it: you
>> have to do it the same way as clang. And you can't reuse anything Walter
>> will come with without much tinkering because Objective-C ARC has to
>> manage autoreleased objects. On the other hand once you have implemented
>> Objective-C ARC it should be easy to retrofit the mechanics of it to
>> other parts of D.
> 
> The question is if this is something that Walter would accept to be included.

You mean if Walter would accept D/Objective-C without ARC? No idea. Ask 
him, or submit a pull request just to gauge the reaction.

People have been manually managing memory with 
retain/release/autorelease for more than a decade and it worked pretty 
well, much better than any other manual reference counting scheme out 
there. One problem with introducing ARC later is that you'll need a 
compiler flag to disable or enable ARC to support both legacy and new 
code.

Personally, I'd be more bothered by the lack of 64-bit than the lack of 
ARC, but that might be just because I'm good with 
retain/release/autorelease.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca