On Tuesday, 8 July 2014 at 21:22:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Distilling the discussions about D that are elsewhere than this
forum, some consistent themes emerge which we need to address
to broaden the appeal of D. All of them require some
organization and focussed effort to complete.
There's been enough jawboning about them. I figure all of them
can be smartly blown to smithereens if we just line up 3 or 4
cannons on each.
1. Ref Counting
I believe that ARC is a pipe dream for D, as we've discussed
extensively here. But a ref counted object should work, and
would be very attractive, much like C++'s shared_ptr<T>.
2. Unique References
unique_ptr<T> is another big success for C++. 2.066 has already
made big strides in inferring uniqueness of expressions, but it
doesn't go so far as creating a Unique!T type.
3. 'ref' means 'borrowed', to use Rust's terminology
We're almost there with this. This means better escape
analysis, too.
4. Eliminating gratuitous use of GC in Phobos
This means allocations that are not transmitted back to the
user. Here's an example of such:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/2014
5. Precise and Concurrent GC
There's been a lot of work on this, but I don't know where we
stand on it.
6. Pushing decisions about storage allocation upwards out of
Phobos
By having functions write to OutputRanges instead of to GC
allocated buffers, the user can decide how to allocate the
storage.
7. "D-Routines" - goroutines for D
Goroutines are the killer feature of Go for a number of
sensible people. We pretty much have this already with fibers,
but what is lacking is a scheduler, which will take some
effort, and a "Channel" type, which should be easy.
8. NotNull!T type
For those that want a non-nullable reference type. This should
be doable as a library type.
All of this would be great, especially 1 and 2.
unique_ptr<T> is helpful in 90% of the time.
shared_ptr<T> is necessary in may be another 9%.
Memory pool is helpful in another cases.
And only in 0.1% case GC is really needed. :)
So how about memory pool for D ?
It there already one ?
What about the already present std.typecons.Unique?
Unfortunately there are a lot of /+Doesn't work yet+/ comments in
std.typecons.Unique code.
