Plan for D

[IGotD-]

On Thursday, 20 May 2021 at 17:52:11 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad 
wrote:
>
> How does Nim deal with references to array elements and struct 
> fields? Does it use fat pointers?

Yes, Nim has fat pointers denoted by the "ref" keyword which 
means that it is GC allocated.

https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html

*References (similar to pointers in other programming languages) 
are a way to introduce many-to-one relationships. This means 
different references can point to and modify the same location in 
memory (also called aliasing).*

*Nim distinguishes between traced and untraced references. 
Untraced references are also called pointers. Traced references 
point to objects of a garbage-collected heap, untraced references 
point to manually allocated objects or objects somewhere else in 
memory. Thus untraced references are unsafe. However, for certain 
low-level operations (accessing the hardware) untraced references 
are unavoidable.*

*Traced references are declared with the ref keyword, untraced 
references are declared with the ptr keyword. In general, a ptr T 
is implicitly convertible to the pointer type.*