On 4/22/2014 4:00 AM, Don wrote:
It turns out to have enormous value. I will explain this in my DConf talk. A
little preview:
Almost all of our code at Sociomantic obeys this behaviour, and it's probably
the most striking feature of our codebase. By "almost all" I mean probably 90%
of our code, including all of our libraries. Not just the 5% - 10% that could
marked as @nogc according to your DIP.
The key property it ensures is, if you make N calls to the function, the number
of GC allocations is in O(1). We don't care if makes 0 allocations or 17.
I don't really understand how dicebot's proposal ensures this property. I guess
it'll have to wait until Dconf!
We're not really interested in whether a function uses the GC or not, since most
interesting functions do need to do some memory allocation.
Ideally, we'd want an attribute which could applied to *all* of Phobos, except
for some convenience functions. We have no interest in library code which
doesn't behave in that way.
