Re: An important pull request: accessing shared affix for immutable data

[Sönke Ludwig via Digitalmars-d]

One thing that I really miss from most of the discussions about RC is 
support for weak references, which IMO should definitely be supported in 
the standard RC implementation. Event if they are only needed rarely, 
there are some things that simply do not work without them. And I don't 
think they can be implemented efficiently on top of ordinary RC.

For them to work natively, the lifetime of the allocated memory block 
and that of the reference count must be separate. So they could either 
simply be a separate allocation, or live in a special reference count 
store, similar to what Objective-C does.