On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 10:51:10 DanielG via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: > On Wednesday, 31 January 2018 at 10:34:53 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: > > delete is deprecated: > > > > https://dlang.org/deprecate.html#delete > > Ah, thanks! Actually double-thanks, because my progress through > your book is what prompted me to search for threads about class > destructors. The existence of .destroy answers my question > (namely, "should I just use 'delete', or my own .dispose method, > for deterministic resource freeing?")
The main problem with delete is that it's inherently unsafe. GC-managed memory is supposed to be @safe (it's one of the main reasons that D has a GC in the first place), but having the programmer go and delete a GC-managed object rather than waiting for the GC to do it makes it trivial to do wrong stuff like free an object's memory while it's still referenced by something else (the sort of thing that the GC is supposed to avoid). It's far better to either explicitly destroy the object without freeing its memory or to use memory that is not managed by the GC if you want deterministic destruction of an object on the heap. - Jonathan M Davis
