dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org)'s articleI've discussed something with Walter today and thought I'd share it here. The possibility of using D without a garbage collector was always looming and has been used to placate naysayers ("you can call malloc if you want" etc.) but that opportunity has not been realized in a seamless manner. As soon as you concatenate arrays, add to a hash, or create an object, you will call into the GC. So I'm thinking there should be a flag -nogc that enables a different model of memory allocation. Here's the steps we need to take: 1. Put array definitions in object.d. Have the compiler rewrite "T[]" -> ".Array!(T)" and "[ a, b, c ]" -> ".Array!(typeof(a))(a, b, c)". I think superdan suggested that when he wasn't busy cursing :o).One of my concerns with this is what effect it would have on CTFE, templates, etc. One of the nice things about truly builtin arrays and AAs is that they fully work at compile time. I'd be for this idea only if we could guarantee that nothing with respect to arrays and AAs that works at compile time now would break if they were moved to object.
All compile-time stuff will remain unchanged. Only when it comes about generating code will the idea enter in action.
Andrei
