On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 19:34:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
At the end of the day if references are part of the language
and programs can build arbitrary reference topologies, safety
entails GC.
It looks like a non sequitur to me... wouldn't this work?
A language X has a built-in data type called Reference, and no
classes.
The only thing you can do with it are using these functions:
Reference CreateObject(Reference typename);
Reference DeleteValue(Reference object, Reference field);
Reference GetValue(Reference object, Reference field);
Reference SetValue(Reference object, Reference field, Reference
value);
Given _just_ these functions you can build _any_ arbitrary
reference topology whatsoever. There's no need for a GC to be
running, and it's completely manual memory management.
It's memory-safe too. What am I missing here?
