Swift does away with pointers == pervasive ARC

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 17 June 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Why wouldn't it? I thought that was the whole point of Andrei's 
> work on
> std.allocator, specifically, a pool allocator. You allocate a 
> pool at
> the beginning of an iteration, and it can be as simple as a
> bump-the-pointer allocator inside the pool, then at the end of 
> the
> iteration you free the entire pool all at once.

One key difference is that iOS is a controlled framework and 
Apple ARC presumes that you only allocate a modest amount of ARC 
objects per event. So you have to take special care if you 
allocate lots of memory per event (create your own pools).

AFAIK,  Apple-style ARC is only safe to use if you don't treat it 
as an optional library solution. The AutoReleasePool does not 
free the entire pool, only the ones that have a retain-count of 
1. The basic idea is that you don't have to match up the initial 
allocation-retain() with a release(). So I believe the codegen 
only have to do retain()/release() when an ARC object might 
escape the "event handler" call chain…

Sure, you can do it for D, but you have to deal with additional 
issues (compared to GC).