On Monday, 24 June 2013 at 17:53:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Arc has very serious problems - I don't see how it can be done and be memory safe without adding extensive pointer annotations. The general problem is someone taking the address of a member of the reference counted object. The rc goes to zero, the objects gets deleted, and there's that dangling pointer to it.
Just thinking out loud, but what if we were able to @disable the & operator? Then if you needed its address, we could do it with some other member function that returns a special type that does the refcount. That'd be a fairly minor language change and would seal the gap that the library could then fill back in.
