On Sunday, 27 June 2021 at 07:48:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Which languages use fat pointers? C++ may use it (but is not
required to).
Probably about all managed languages. One common method is a that
it is actually an identifier it is used in a hash table. Then you
can find all sorts of meta data in there. My original point was
that this consume more memory in managed languages but nobody
seems to mind.
Not sure what you mean by expanding? I never liked `alias this`
for structs, inheritance would be simpler. Is this what you
mean by expanding?
When you use a struct as a member variable in another struct the
data will be expanded into the host struct. If the member struct
is 16 bytes then the host struct will have grow 16 bytes to
accommodate that member struct.
This is not the case in D with classes as classes always are
allocated on the heap using dynamic allocation. This leads to
more fragmentation and memory consumption.
