Idea #1 on integrating RC with GC

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/6/14, 4:29 PM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 February 2014 at 11:44:34 UTC, Michel Fortin wrote:
>> That thread about buildPath started like this: "Walter and I were
>> talking about eliminating the surreptitious allocations in buildPath".
>> But reference counting will do nothing to eliminate surreptitious
>> allocations. It can't be that problem you're trying to address.
>
> I think stuff like buildPath just shows how the language should be
> geared more towards compiler optimizations of allocation if performance
> is a real goal.
>
> The efficient thing to do is to optimize a string concat into a stack
> allocation (alloca) if it is a throw-away, and just change the stack
> frame upon return, with some heuristics and alternative execution paths
> in order to avoid running out of stack space.

This is a very incomplete, naive sketch. It could be made to work only 
in a language that has no backward compatibility to worry about.

Andrei