On Sunday, 24 August 2014 at 12:24:03 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
To that end I'm working on RCString, an industrial-strength
string type that's much like string, just reference counted and
with configurable allocation. It's safe, too - user code cannot
casually extract references to string internals. By default
allocation would use GC's primitives; one thing I learned to
appreciate about our GC is its ability to free memory
explicitly, which means RCString will free memory
deterministically most of the time, yet if you leak some (e.g.
by having RCString class members) the GC will pick up the
litter. I think reference counting backed up by a GC that lifts
litter and cycles and is a modern, emergent pattern that D
could use to great effect.
Any reason why this is restricted to strings? I.e., is there
something special about strings (apart from auto-decoding) that
doesn't apply to arrays in general? If not, wouldn't an RCArray
be a better idea?
