On Tuesday, 4 February 2014 at 22:17:40 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
This is an important point. However, the default is to be safe,
and good enough for most.
Yes, absolutely. I am all for progressive refinement, starting
out with something conceptual and very close to pseudocode, with
all the convenience of high level programming. Then replace the
parts that does not perform.
In Objective-C you don't really care that much about performance
though, Cocoa provides very versatile libraries doing a lot of
the work for you, but you have to go one step down to get speed
without libraries. Inefficiencies are less noticeable in a heavy
library/premade-components environment like Cococa than in a more
barebones hit-the-iron-C-like approach.
One could also say you could mark a memory region as no-scan if
you know that the data it points at will never be collected for
its entire existence in a GC environment.
Yes, I agree. You could have the same type in different pools and
mark one of the pools as no-scan. You could have pool-local
GC/segmented GC or even type-limited GC with whole program
analysis (only collecting a specific class/subclasses).
I think some mix of GC and ref counting for D would be
extremely useful.
Yes, I don't want to throw out GC, but I think it would be more
valuable and more realistic to have C++ reference semantics than
advanced compiler inferred ARC, though I don't mind ARC, I think
it probably is harder to get right for a more pure C systems
level language than for Objective-C with Cocoa.
So, I think ARC is right for Cocoa, but not so sure about how
well it works in other environments.
