More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 12 May 2014 at 17:03:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/12/2014 2:12 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>> I think this is more of library writing culture problem than 
>> engineering
>> problem. High quality library shouldn't rely on any internal 
>> allocations at all,
>> deferring this decision to user code. Otherwise you will 
>> eventually have
>> problems, GC or not.
>
> Consider my PR:
>
>  https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/2149
>
> This is exactly what it does - it 'pushes' the decisions about 
> allocating memory up out of the library to the user. I suspect 
> a great deal of storage allocation can be removed from Phobos 
> with this technique, without sacrificing performance, 
> flexibility, or memory safety. (In fact, it improves on 
> performance and flexibility!)

We have already had discussion where I did state that current 
@nogc implementation is not robust enough and failed to explain 
the use case for weaker @nogc clearly. Conclusion was that we 
should return to this topic after Don's DConf talk ;)