On 10 October 2013 03:13, Michel Fortin <michel.for...@michelf.ca> wrote:
> On 2013-10-09 16:51:03 +0000, Manu <turkey...@gmail.com> said: > > On 10 October 2013 01:40, Johannes Pfau <nos...@example.com> wrote: >> >> But if someone really wants to strip the GC _completely_ there's a huge >>> issue with memory management of Exceptions. >>> >> >> Exceptions have a pretty well defined lifetime... can't they be manually >> cleaned up by the exception handler after the catching scope exits? >> > > Exceptions don't need a well-defined lifetime for things to work. > > D exceptions are classes and are heap-allocated. So if everything becomes > reference-counted, exceptions would be reference-counted too. The exception > handler would be the one decrementing the reference count once it has done > with the exception (all this under the hood, managed by the compiler). > > Alternatively an exception handler could return the exception to the > parent function (as a return value), store the exception elsewhere, or > throw it again, in which case the decrement operation would be balanced by > an increment, and both increment and decrement should be elided by the > compiler as they're cancelling each other. > > I fail to see an issue. I was talking about using exceptions without any sort of GC at all. I think it's the only critical language feature left that relies on a GC in some form. If would be nice if at least the fundamental language concepts were usable without a GC of any sort. Most other things can be reasonably worked around at this point.
