On 4/17/2014 6:58 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
Auto-nulling weak references are perfectly memory-safe. In Objective-C you use
the __weak pointer modifier for that. If you don't want it to be auto-nulling,
use __unsafe_unretained instead to get a raw pointer. In general, seeing
__unsafe_unretained in the code is a red flag however. You'd better know what
you're doing.
If you could transpose the concept to D, __weak would be allowed in @safe
functions while __unsafe_unretained would not. And thus memory-safety is
preserved.
I recall our email discussion about implementing ARC in D that we couldn't even
avoid an inc/dec for the 'this' when calling member functions. So I don't see
how inc/dec can be elided in sufficient numbers to make ARC performant and
unbloated.
Of course, you can always *manually* elide these things, but then if you make a
mistake, then you've got a leak and memory corruption.
