On Sunday, 2 February 2014 at 16:55:35 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I think of the following foci for the first half of 2014:
1. Add @nullable and provide a -nullable compiler flag to
verify it. The attribute is inferred locally and for white-box
functions (lambdas, templates), and required as annotation
otherwise. References not annotated with @nullable are
statically enforced to never be null.
2. Work on Phobos to see what can be done about avoiding
unnecessary allocation. Most likely we'll need to also add a
@nogc flag.
3. Work on adding tracing capabilities to allocators and see
how to integrate them with the language and Phobos.
4. Work on the core language and druntime to see how to
seamlessly accommodate alternate GC mechanisms such as
reference counting.
Andrei
This is an excellent direction to take the language in the
near-term. It seems that some who would like to use D are afraid
of the GC. Others have legitimate use-cases where the effort of
manually managing memory is warranted, such as a
memory-constrained environment. Being able to accommodate both,
provide an integrated approach to allocation, and allow for
ref-counting as a viable alternative to GC is a home run. Also
will be nice to see Phobos memory usage trimmed down. I feel that
these items mentioned above combined will put D into a niche that
other languages will find it difficult to compete with:
end-to-end fine-grained memory control. Nice!
Just my 10 cents.
Joseph
