This is the first I've heard that allocating GC memory in a
destructor will crash. That's an unexpected gotcha. I'd expect to
be able to reliably do I/O or throw an exception.
Strategy 1. Fix the GC's limitation. (One fewer pitfall to
baby-sit.)
Strategy 2. Have the compiler inform the programmer. (The
compiler can't catch all bugs but it should do what it can.
Arguably this is a GC bug, not mine.)
Strategy 3. Put bold warnings in the reference
<http://dlang.org/class.html#destructors> and all tutorials.
That's useful but insufficient. Programmers will carry
assumptions from other programming languages. Even those who read
the D reference won't all remember that detail when it matters.
Strategy 4. Accept such crashes. (No good. The D home page
promises safety.)
On Saturday, 24 January 2015 at 15:04:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
If the classes are written for RAII then the destructors have
to be called in reverse order of the constructors. IIRC D does
not guarantee this when you use the GC.
So to do it right there is a lot of GC overhead.
Yes, but the usability question is what do programmers expect?
How much do they assume before turning to the docs?
It's a big stretch to expect LIFO behavior from garbage
collection. It's not a stretch to expect logging to work.
