On 10/5/14, 3:08 PM, eles wrote:
On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 14:55:38 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
Right now I have no idea where the development is headed and what to
expect from next few releases. I am not speaking about
wiki.dlang.org/Agenda but about bigger picture. Unexpected focus on
C++ support, thread about killing auto-decoding, recent ref counting
proposal
Just to add more salt:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/09/10047586.aspx
Raymond Chen: " When you ask somebody what garbage collection is, the
answer you get is probably going to be something along the lines of
"Garbage collection is when the operating environment automatically
reclaims memory that is no longer being used by the program. It does
this by tracing memory starting from roots to identify which objects are
accessible."
This description confuses the mechanism with the goal. It's like saying
the job of a firefighter is "driving a red truck and spraying water."
That's a description of what a firefighter does, but it misses the point
of the job (namely, putting out fires and, more generally, fire safety).
Garbage collection is simulating a computer with an infinite amount of
memory. The rest is mechanism. And naturally, the mechanism is
"reclaiming memory that the program wouldn't notice went missing." It's
one giant application of the as-if rule."
Interesting, in the comments, the distinction that is made between
finalizers and destructors, even if they happen to have the same syntax,
for example in C# and C++.
For example here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/09/10047586.aspx#10047776
I feel difficult to swallow the fact that D classes do not lend
themselves to RAII. While I could accept the memory management could be
left outside RAII, running destructors (or disposers) deterministically
is a must.
I particularily find bad that D recommends using structs to free
resources because the destructor of those is run automatically. Just
look at this example:
http://dlang.org/cpptod.html#raii
struct File
{
Handle h;
~this()
{
h.release();
}
}
void test()
{
if (...)
{
auto f = File();
...
} // f.~this() gets run at closing brace, even if
// scope was exited via a thrown exception
}
Even if C++ structs are almost the same as classes, the logical solit
between the two is: structs are DATA, classes are BEHAVIOR. I will not
get my head around the fact that I will *recommend* putting methods in a
struct.
The main distinction between structs and classes in D is the former are
monomorphic value types and the later are polymorphic reference types.
-- Andrei
