On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 20:16:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
What you're missing is that you define a store that doesn't
model object references with object addresses. That's what I
meant by "references are part of the language". If store is
modeled by actual memory (i.e. accessing an object handle takes
you to the object), you must have GC for the language to be
safe. If store is actually indirected and gives up on the
notion of address, then sure you can implement safety checks.
The thing is everybody wants for references to model actual
object addresses; indirect handles as the core abstraction are
uninteresting.
Andrei
But why can't Reference hold the actual address too?
Seems like a perfectly reasonable implementation to me, and
there's no extra indirection involved that way, right?
