On Monday, 12 October 2015 at 08:21:24 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 14:13:30 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
I've programmed extensively in C++ with smart pointers, and in
my experience, circular references are rarely a problem. There
are some cases where it's obvious that you have one (e.g.
where one object owns another and they need to talk to each
other), in which case you either use a normal pointer or a
weak reference, depending on which makes more sense. And in
the cases that you don't catch, you find them in testing,
figure out what should be a weak reference to get rid of the
circular dependency, you fix it, and you move on. It really
isn't a big deal in general, though I suppose that there could
be certain ways of designing programs where it would be more
problematic.
That's all understandable. What's not understandable is when
one insists that a necessity to figure out ownership for every
non-resource object in C++ is superior to D.
If you don't want to care about ownership, then use a GC. The
only other memory management model that I can think of where you
don't have to care about ownership is when everything is a value
type on the stack, so there's nothing to own.
There are pros and cons to using a GC, and there are pros and
cons to use reference counting everything on the heap. I don't
think that either is objectively superior. It all depends on what
you're trying to do and what your requirements are.
- Jonathan M Davis
