On Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:28:44 -0400, Michel Fortin
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 2010-04-03 23:21:48 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
On 04/02/2010 03:53 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
dsimcha wrote:
I almost never do this with any data structure other
than an array because, even if it works for now, I consider it a
horrible
violation of encapsulation because you're relying on the details of
how the data
structure manipulates memory. This is also why, when I designed RandAA
I didn't
see this as an issue until you pointed it out to me.
Andrei is working on the design of the D collection class library.
After
much thought and research, he finally came to the conclusion that a
collection class should not allow the address of a member to be taken.
I
think his reasoning on the issue is pretty sound, and is consistent
with
your take on it.
I wouldn't call it research, but I agonized a fair amount over it. I
think Phobos containers will all use malloc, realloc, and free for
their own storage, while still being safe.
I think this is a sound decision. And I'm not necessarily talking about
using malloc, realloc, and free (even though a container capable of
using realloc is certainly a plus), but the one about decoupling the
container interface from any particular memory management implementation.
Question: if the container's memory isn't garbage-collected, how do you
implement iterators, eh, ranges so that they are still memory-safe?
Another problem is if the elements of the container have references to
GC-managed data. This means you have to addroot any memory you allocate
with malloc.
Non-reference type elements of course can use C's malloc and free. This
is how Tango works.
-Steve
