1. Memory management. Delphi is quite incosistent here by allowing component classes to be auto managed (via their owner) whilst non-component class have to be manually managed. The best solution I can think for this is to reference count non-component classes. This should be safe for TObjects but obviously not for Tcomponent descendants (cf circular reference problem) so a protected variable could be added to TObject to specify whether to ref count it or not (with TComponent turning it off). This will improve legibility of code too as there will no longer be a need for having loads of try..finally statements to free stuff. Backwards compatibility should not be affected so if you call a free method it will free it whatever its ref count.
there would be quite some performance penalty to this. Refcounting is actually quite expensive especially because of the way it adds loads of extra try-finally blocks to the asm.
not much more cause you would still need try finally blocks in most cases for robust code. In other cases you can use a pointer to avoid overhead (IE in cases where you are not actually creating instances).
furthermore how do you propose to do such a thing while maintaining the capability to typecast safely back and forward between object types and integer types which so much code relys on.
not sure I understand the problem here. Can you give an example?
jamie.
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