On Friday, 28 February 2014 at 11:28:01 UTC, Szymon Gatner wrote:
I didn't mean "basic" in the sense of "easy" but in the sense of something that has to dealt with all the time / is common requirement.
Yes, it needs to be dealt with all the time but in a different ways. Problem is with getting sensible defaults. D makes a reasonable assumption that most applications don't actually care about tight bullet-proof resource management and defaults to GC. I may not like it but it fits criteria "built-in resource management" and pretty much shows that it is not as basic as one may think.
"Programs == Algorithms + Data structures" great man once said. D is pretty damn good at algorithms part, better than C++ thanks to ranges (zero cost composability codegen issues aside) but data strucutres... I wish I felt the same way about them.
Most problems I have with D data structures come from qualifiers, not from resource management. I really don't understand why this looks that much of a problem. That said, my background very influenced by plain C and that results in different habits and expectations.
Is that a limitation imposed by GC somehow? My understanding is that GC has to scan from root to leaves so it knows the structure exactly anyway, why not just generate finalizer call list when traversing?
Can't tell because of my very limited knowledge about GC internals. In practice I don't care because I never ever want to interfere with GC resource mangement - stuff that I want to micro-managed is allocated from custom pools and thus is not a subject to unexpected destructor calls.
