On Tuesday, 4 July 2017 at 03:13:14 UTC, Filip Bystricky wrote:
Oh and I forgot to mention: another use-case for this would be for arrays. For manually managed arrays like std.container.array, it would make it possible to transfer ownership of individual objects from the array back to the program after the array goes out of scope.
Not sure I understand you here: If an instance of such a manual array implementation goes out of scope it must destruct (if they are objects and not primitives) and deallocate its elements. There is no ownership transfer going on here (and who would be the target, anyway?).
For gc slices, it could enable some gc implementations to deallocate parts of an array even if there are still references pointing inside that array.
I'm fairly certain the necessary bookkeeping logic for partial deallocations will outweigh any gain from it. In the case of such gc slices, I would rather just memcpy to a new, smaller block and update pointers to it (-> a moving GC).
