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

[bearophile via Digitalmars-d]

Andrei Alexandrescu:

> 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.

Is adding reference counted strings to D going to add a 
significant amount of complexity for the programmers?

As usual your judgement is better than mine, but surely the 
increase in complexity of D language and its usage must be 
considered in this rcstring discussion. So far I have not seen 
this point discussed enough in this thread.

D is currently quite complex, so I prefer enhancements that 
simplify the code (like tuples), or that make it safer (this 
mostly means type system improvements, like eprovably correct 
tracking of memory areas and lifetimes, or stricter types for 
array indexes, or better means to detect errors at compile-times 
with more compile-time introspection for function/ctor 
arguments), or features that have a limited scope and don't 
increase the general code complexity much (like the partial type 
inference patch created by Kenji).

Bye,
bearophile