On Thursday, 6 February 2014 at 23:13:11 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
The intent is to make it possible to avoid the GC, but if I understand you correctly you talk about always allocating through the GC first.
One of the ideas on the table is to use ARC backed by the GC to clear cycles, which would mean the GC needs to be aware of all allocations anyway so it can scan and clear them if a cycle is formed. It's not safe to start reference counting GC memory at an arbitrary time after allocation, since references to it could be anywhere, but if you have a unique expression, then you know there are no other references to the new data, so it's safe to begin reference counting it at that time before it propagates out into the program at large.
