dsimcha Wrote: > == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org)'s article > > Walter and I have been discussing what the regime of statically-sized > > arrays should be. In short, the behavior that's most consistent with > > everything else is to treat them as values. > > This also brings the problems of e.g. containers - should they have > > consistent value semantics (like in STL) > > Oh God no! I always thought the value semantics of STL containers were > largely a > kludge to work around the fact that C++ doesn't have garbage collection. They > make it easier to use RAII for memory management, since every object has a > clear > owner. This leads to tons and tons of copying if code is written the obvious > way, > and lots of kludges to prevent it.
On the other hand, for relatively small objects, the last thing I want is to have everything be a reference. This is one of the major flaws of Java, I think, from a memory efficiency standpoint. I'd hate to have to have references to 16 byte objects if I don't need the sharing behavior. Having classes with reference semantics in D largely solves this issue, doesn't it? Use a class when you have things that make sense to share, and use structs for when it makes more sense to have distinct copies. Jerry
