> On May 7, 2021, at 2:46 AM, Sven Barth via fpc-devel
> <fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
> I cannot speak for others, but I think 90% of potential use cases for ref
> counting
> would be covered like this in my code: objects that only live inside a
> procedure.
>
> I think the same.
There's also a function which returns dynamically allocated memory but doesn't
intend for you to keep it around very long. Cocoa/Objective-C has a good system
for this which is an "autorelease pool" and while it's not language construct
but rather a runtime system it does rely on an "Any" type (called id in
Objective-C) so that methods can be chained together like this:
a := TArray.Create([1,2,3]).AutoRelease;
We can't do this in Pascal because the AutoRelease functions return type is not
compatible with the type of the caller. Could we add something like an "Any"
return type to Pascal which is a type that is compatible with any class? This
relies on an event loop that can capture this garbage and dispose of it but it
goes a LONG way in helping with common memory management problems.
Regards,
Ryan Joseph
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