On Wednesday, 30 April 2014 at 15:33:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
4. Currently, struct objects created with new do NOT have their
destructors called during collection. I think this may
continue, meaning that structs created with new are somewhat
low-level and are meant to be destroyed and deallocated
manually.
5. This brings up arrays of structs. As far as I understand,
destructors will never be called for these, even after all
references are gone:
struct S { ~this() { ... } }
auto a = new S[100];
Unlike (4), arrays of structs are high-level and frequently
used. I think we must do something about it, so I plan to
support calling destructors for arrays of structs.
Although it would be a breaking change, I am intending to propose
that the destructors of heap-allocated structs be handled in the
same way as destructors of classes in my GC implementation. I am
also intending to propose a guarantee that, if the program exits
normally, all destructors will be invoked before the application
ends. To help facilitate this I intend to have a thread dedicated
to calling destructors. I'm still working on typing out the
entire design of the GC, but I don't currently see a reason
(design-wise) why I'd have to change these things.
