On Sunday, 24 August 2014 at 12:49:30 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
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?
We already have an 'RCArray' (std.container.Array) although it's
not perfect.
We don't have a reference counted string type that would work
with the string operation functions.
