Escaping the Tyranny of the GC: std.rcstring, first blood

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/15/14, 3:30 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>
>> Walter, Brad, myself, and a couple of others have had a couple of
>> quite exciting ideas regarding code that is configurable to use the GC
>> or alternate resource management strategies.
>
> An alternative design solution is to follow the Java way, leave the D
> strings as they are, and avoid to make a mess of user D code. Java GC
> and runtime contain numerous optimizations for the management of
> strings, like the recently introduced string de-duplication at run-time:
>
> https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/08/string-deduplication-new-feature-java-8-update-20-2

Again, it's become obvious that a category of users will simply refuse 
to use a GC, either for the right or the wrong reasons. We must make D 
eminently usable for them.

Andrei