On 10/6/10 14:09 CDT, Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2010-10-06 12:34:54 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
2. It would force certain types (such as BigInt) that allocate
resources and have value semantics to resort to reference counting.
Also, before asking for more reference counting, perhaps you should
check that bug and find a nice way to do reference counting correctly
with no race conditions (unlike what's done in Phobos currently).
<http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4624>
I'm not sure the bug report is valid, but I agree it's a matter to look
into.
The most problematic thing with reference-counted memory is that the GC
can call your struct's destructor from any thread which can cause
low-level races if the reference counter isn't manipulated with atomic
operations. And atomic operations slow things down, are you sure you
want to force this in BigInt?
The GC shouldn't be able to destroy things naively concurrently with
other threads. Currently all threads are frozen; I'm not sure whether a
frozen thread commits its writes, so that needs to be verified.
Andrei
