On 9/14/14, 7:52 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Monday, 15 September 2014 at 02:26:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
The road there is long, but it starts with the proverbial first step.
An unrelated question, but how will reference counting work with classes?
I've recently switched my networking library's raw memory wrapper to
reference counting (previously it just relied on the GC for cleanup),
and it was going well until I've hit a brick wall.
The thing with reference counting is it doesn't seem to make sense to do
it half-way. Everything across the ownership chain must be reference
counted, because otherwise the non-ref-counted link will hold on to its
ref-counted child objects forever (until the next GC cycle).
In my case, the classes in my applications were holding on to my
reference-counted structs, and wouldn't let go until they were
eventually garbage-collected. I can't convert the classes to structs
because I need their inheritance/polymorphism, and I don't see an
obvious way to refcount classes (RefCounted explicitly does not support
classes).
Am I overlooking something?
At least for the time being, bona fide class objects with refcounted
members will hold on to them until they're manually freed or a GC cycle
comes about.
We're thinking of a number of schemes for reference counted objects, and
we think a bottom-up approach to design would work well here: try a
simple design and assess its limitations. In this case, it would be
great if you tried to use RefCounted with your class objects and figure
out what its limitations are.
Thanks,
Andrei
