The "no gc" crowd

[Daniel Davidson]

On Thursday, 10 October 2013 at 17:39:55 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Oct 10, 2013, at 10:23 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
> <joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:
>
>> On 09/10/13 06:25, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> The way I see it we must devise a robust solution to that, 
>>> NOT consider the
>>> state of the art immutable (heh, a pun).
>> 
>> Must say I have had a miserable experience with immutability 
>> and any kind of complex data structure, particularly when 
>> concurrency is involved.
>
> As long as the reference itself can be reassigned 
> (tail-immutable, I suppose) I think immutable is occasionally 
> quite useful for complex data structures.  It basically 
> formalizes the RCU (read-copy-update) approach to wait-free 
> concurrency.  I'd tend to use this most often for global data 
> structures built up on app start, and updated rarely to never 
> as the program runs.

Nice. Please show an example that includes complex data with 
associative arrays.

Thanks
Dan