I have to say that all this discussion (more precisely the
understanding on the side of key developers) make me very upset.
It's good that Andrei agreed with impossibility of the
harebrained disallowing of the class destructors. But I was very
surprise, that so thought go to such head, because such solution
contradicts the D spirit totally. There are many language which
are very popular and have many dark moments in their design. I
(and I think not only me) go to the D not for its popularity, but
for its clarity, power and SANITY (that bases on strong
guaranties). The strong solutions found on the strong decision
makes D itself. (Examples of such strong solutions:
immutabilities, default unshareness, struct and class as distinct
being). And way that leads us in state where stucts have dtors
and classes haven't but allow struct with dtor as member and
people have to call struct dtor manually, isn't D way. Because
such way relies on programmers discipline, but how Andrei has
written "If there one thing that decades of computing have taught
us, it must be that discipline-oriented programming does not
scale."[TDPL, p. 399].
Our negative filling flood out may be sane from psychologically
view, but neither sane nor constructive for D future. For solving
problem it's need its formulate. We have to state that current
state (lack of structs' dtors call guaranty) is insane, the
harebrained disallowing of the class destructors is insane too.
And what is sane? If I properly understand philosophy of D, we
need semiautomated (not full) resource manager with strong
guaranty and good performance, and which automated mode covers
the most part of use-case. It is the target. Garbage collection
or reference counting or any possible third way is a detail
therefor task and mean not a target. And one task, that lays on
the way to target, is minimal rape of D2 language (even if
solution will be D3), so IMO dtors (perhaps only for structs)
must survive.
I notice that I view only part of problem, can anybody link or
describe me completely state and problems of current garbage
collection and other resource management? It help me in finding
of existence solution (at least theoretical).
---
Alaksiej Stankievič
