More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 30 April 2014 at 20:21:33 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Walter and I have had a long chat in which we figured our 
> current offering of abstractions could be improved. Here are 
> some thoughts. There's a lot of work ahead of us on that and I 
> wanted to make sure we're getting full community buy-in and 
> backup.
>
> First off, we're considering eliminating destructor calls from 
> within the GC entirely. It makes for a faster and better GC, 
> but the real reason here is that destructors are 
> philosophically bankrupt in a GC environment. I think there's 
> no need to argue that in this community. The GC never 
> guarantees calling destructors even today, so this decision 
> would be just a point in the definition space (albeit an 
> extreme one).

An extreme one indeed, it would break a lot of my code. Every D 
project I wrote that does networking manages memory using a class 
that resides on the managed heap, but holds the actual wrapped 
data in the unmanaged heap. It has a number of advantages over 
other approaches, and I've posted it to the announce group, but 
the idea didn't seem to catch on.

https://github.com/CyberShadow/ae/blob/master/sys/data.d

I could migrate the concept to use reference counting (it was 
implemented in D1, before reference counting was possible), but 
that's my situation regarding breaking existing code.