draft proposal for ref counting in D

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

On Jun 26, 2013, at 12:10 AM, Walter Bright wrote:

 >
 > On 6/25/2013 8:08 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 >> On Jun 25, 2013, at 11:04 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 >>
 >>> On 6/25/2013 6:31 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
 >>>> And finally, there's nothing unsafe with autorelease pools as long as you 
don't keep an unretained reference to an autoreleased object when the pool drains.
 >>> Well, that's exactly the issue - an escaping reference.
 >>>
 >> Read the next sentence after your quote though:
 >>
 >> "Making sure you have no unretained reference is ARC's job, so with ARC it 
should not be no problem."
 >>
 >> So with ARC, it's not unsafe.  I think that was the ultimate point.
 >
 > Yes, I read the next sentence. What it means to me is that autorelease pools 
add nothing when ARC is implemented - no optimizations, either. Either that or I 
don't understand how ARC figures out that there are no escaping references 
without doing things like runtime checks.

OK, it sounded like you were saying still that Objective C with ARC didn't have 
memory safety.

I'm no longer arguing about autorelease, I defer to Michel on that.  I clearly 
didn't understand that autorelease doesn't provide any benefits for ARC, it's 
just there for compatibility.

-Steve