On Monday, 16 June 2014 at 18:12:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
But I did not say it was "not feasible". I said pervasive ARC
in D simply would not deliver the results you wanted. I doubt
it delivers them in Swift, either, though of course I don't
have experience with Swift.
I.e. pervasive ARC in D would not deliver performance unless
memory safety was discarded.
Swift targets the same VM as ObjC so I think ARC was a foregone
conclusion. And for that case it makes sense, as predictable
performance is crucial on mobile platforms. Since D has raw
pointers and inline assembly I don't see ARC as being terribly
practical here however. It's kind of the same issue as having
write barriers to support an incremental GC.
