Prevent struct going into heap memory
Richard Andrew Cattermole (Rikki)
richard at cattermole.co.nz
Sun Jul 20 17:04:11 UTC 2025
In response to some concerns around the situation for RAII
structs going into closures, I am proposing a resolution to this
that will be a language-wide guarantee, not an ultra-specific,
not-a-guarantee solution.
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/issues/18704
If a struct destructor is annotated with an attribute
``@stackonly`` it may only be called if the ``this`` pointer is
allocated on the stack. It does not overload.
```d
struct RAII {
~this() @stackonly {}
}
void foo() {
RAII* gc = new RAII; // Error: RAII can only be cleaned up if
it is on the stack
scope RAII* stack1 = new RAII; // ok
RAII stack2 = RAII(); // ok
}
```
The attribute is inferred based upon the fields.
```d
struct Wrapper {
RAII raii;
~this() /* @stackonly */ {}
}
```
As closure creation can see this, no variable that is stack only,
cannot be moved into a closure.
Currently D does not model GC vs non-GC pointers, therefore
moving into pointers is also disallowed.
```d
RAII* ptr = ...;
*ptr = RAII(); // Error
```
But only in ``@safe`` code. For ``@system`` code, it is allowed
to by-pass this restriction for data structures.
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