On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 15:13:40 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
the GC heap, which is unnecessarily limiting, particularly
since in many cases, it's perfectly okay to let objects that
might normally be destroy deterministically to be destroyed at
the GC's leisure.
This is a costly (in terms of collection) and unreliable approach
to resource managment, so it ought to be removed and replaced
with something more robust with less overhead.
speculation on my part. Regardless, if we have a proper
ref-counting mechanism for classes (built-in or not doesn't
necessarily matter - it just needs to work), then the folks
that need deterministic destruction with polymorphism get it.
Proper reference counting generally requires a lot of programmer
attention if you want to get what C++ offers.
1. There is a need to add support for weak pointers so you can
avoid circular references, this leads to double indirection.
2. There is a need to add support aliasing pointers (pointers to
members) that increase the ownership refcount to prevent
premature destruction if you retain a pointer to a member.
3. For multi threading you need to have atomics both on the
counter and on the pointer (coming in C++17). This is also
needed for cache-objects IMO.
