DIP74 - where is at?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 07:55:08 UTC, Manu wrote:
> Sure. If you don't care, I'm sure it's fine. But I don't feel 
> it's reasonable to say C++ has ref counting. You might as well 
> say "C++ has garbage collection" (which is probably actually 
> more true than this) ;) ... Objective-C supports ref counting.

Reference counting is now part of C++'s standard library. They 
may not have the kind of reference counting that you want, but 
they support reference counting as part of the C++ standard.

And certainly for my use cases, having wrapper classes like 
smart_ptr has worked fantastically. Any performance hit that 
might be incurred be extraneous increments and decrements is 
dwarfed by everything else that the program is doing. And I think 
that it's pretty clear that the same is true for a _lot_ of 
programs.

I can certainly believe that it's not true for the kind of 
programs that you write, and if we can better support those 
environments, great. But most programmers don't program in a 
world where it normally matters whether a couple of extra math 
operations are done or whether a function call is virtual or not. 
It matters in certain areas of the program but not in general. We 
don't want to be doing unnecessary operations, and efficiency in 
other areas can have a huge impact on our programs, but I think 
that it's quite clear that you live in a world that cares way 
more about every little ounce of efficiency than most programmers 
do.

So, I think that it's a huge stretch to say that C++ doesn't have 
ref-counting or that it doesn't work - or even that a similar 
solution in D wouldn't work. It would work for many people. If we 
can come up with one that better supports your use cases, then 
great. As long as the cost elsewhere isn't too high, why not? But 
that doesn't mean that a solution like smart_ptr isn't a 
fantastic one for many of us.

- Jonathan M Davis