On 10/27/2015 11:10 AM, deadalnix wrote:
I've made the claim that we should implement reference counting as a library many time, so I think I should explicit my position. Indeed, RC require some level a compiler support to be safe. That being said, the support does not need to be specific to RC. On fact, my position is that the language should provide some basic mechanism on top of which safe RC can be implemented, as a library.
It's not just safety. If the compiler knows that reference counting is going on, it can potentially elide a lot of the overhead. If it is faced with an arbitrary library solution, it only has a worm's eye view of it, and cannot do higher level optimizations.
