El 11/12/2011 16:14, Chad J escribió:
On 12/11/2011 08:15 AM, maarten van damme wrote:
...
I think one thing that could would be (optional) reference counting for
transitively atomic types. Of course, this is just another kind of
garbage collection, but it is /deterministic/ and parallelizes well, and
I bet this would open up a large amount of Phobos while the
stop-the-world collector is offline, and with little or no code change.
The big example in my mind is strings. Strings are straight-up atomic.
They can't have the reference cycles that would confuse a reference
counter. And if we allowed them to be reference-counted, then all of
the string functions using copy-on-write would now work with the
stop-the-world collector disabled.
Yes, an alternative to GC is reference counting with immediate
destruction. It is used for instance in Vala (a language on top of the
GObject system, a bit reminiscent of D):
http://live.gnome.org/Vala/ReferenceHandling
But I think it would be too complicated to turn all D's arrays, objects,
etc. into a system like this.
