unique ownership + unlimited safe generational references

[Nick Treleaven]

On Tuesday, 29 March 2022 at 17:40:27 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> In general I think that unique ownership of pointers is a 
> plague in computer science and it needs to die. The reason is 
> that it is fundamentally data structure unfriendly.

Vale has unique ownership of objects, the references/pointers 
aren't owned. But I think you could have shared ownership of 
objects and still benefit from generational references. Maybe GR 
are like weak references, except (hopefully) more efficient. 
(Based on a cursory google of weak references in C++ and Swift, 
it seems they require an extra allocation per-object for the 
counter).

> When it comes to the memory management described here 
> (Generational References), it is like a runtime version of the 
> borrow checker in Rust (not completely, but close). It solves 
> use after free but what does it solve beyond that?

Memory-safety without GC is a big thing.

> Also, does need to do a check for every deference?

I suppose it would need to re-check if any code/function call was 
made in between dereferences that could have destroyed the owner.