Proposal : aggregated dlang git repository

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 05:39:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 03:20:57AM +0000, weaselcat via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>> I was just using RefCounted!T as one example of a major 
>> headache I've
>> had with D.
> [...]
>
> Jakob Ovrum has just submitted a PR to make (the current 
> version of)
> RefCounted reject interfaces, since currently it doesn't do that
> correctly (it refcounts the reference to the interface rather 
> than the
> target object).
>
> Given this is the current situation, it would appear to me to 
> make
> RefCounted work with class objects, "all" we have to do would 
> be to
> specialize RefCounted for classes, use malloc to allocate the 
> necessary
> space (plus the refcount, of course), and emplace() the class 
> object
> onto that space. Right?
>
> Of course, given that it has been ... oh, months? years? since
> RefCounted issues have been addressed, I'm probably just 
> kidding myself
> that there are no major monkey wrenches in the works that would 
> make the
> above simplistic solution not work. And I'm not sure I really 
> want to
> know... Not until I have an actual use case for RefCounted in 
> my own
> code, anyway, since otherwise I wouldn't have any confidence 
> that I was

Biggest problem with RefCounted is that it is a struct. Thus it 
is inherently incompatible with polymorphic world. It is 
impossible to do reference counted exceptions without language 
changes (Andrei had proposal about it but it seems to have 
stalled). It may be possible but not obvious how to do referenced 
counted interfaces (that point to reference counted classes). It 
is unclear how one would write in an idiomatic manner a function 
that accepts object instance without caring if it is GC or 
ref-counted one (without resorting to templates).