On 9/29/14, 8:53 AM, Dicebot wrote:
On Monday, 29 September 2014 at 15:18:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 9/29/14, 5:29 AM, Dicebot wrote:
Any assumption that library code can go away with some set of
pre-defined allocation strategies is crap. This whole discussion was
about how important it is to move allocation decisions to user code
(ranges are just one tool to achieve that, Don has been presenting
examples of how we do that with plain arrays in DConf 2014 talk).
That's making exactly the confusion I was - that memory allocation
strategy is the same as memory management strategy.
Yes but neither decision belongs to library code except for very rare
cases.
You just assert it, so all I can say is "I understand you believe this".
I've motivated my argument. You may want to do the same for yours.
In that regard allocators + ranges are still the way to go in my
opinion. Yes, sometimes those result in very hard to use API - providing
GC-heavy but friendly alternatives for those shouldn't do any harm. But
in general full decoupling of algorithms from allocations is necessary.
If that makes D poor cousin of C++ we may have a learn few tricks
from C++.
As long as things are trivial they can be done with relative ease,
albeit with more pain. But consider e.g. the recent JSON library by
Sönke. It needs to create a lookup data structure and return things
like strings from it. What primitives do you think could it define?
Sounds like it may have to define own kind of allocator with certain
implementation restrictions (and implement it in terms of GC by
default). I have not actually read the code for that proposal so hard to
guess. Will need to do it if it really matters.
So you don't have an answer. And again you are confusing memory
allocation with memory management.
I have sketched an approach that works and will take us to Phobos being
most transparently usable with tracing collection or with reference
counting. Part of that is RCString (and generally reference counted
slices and hashtables), and another part is the @refcounted attribute
for classes. I will push it through. If you have any objections, it
would be great if you argued them properly.
Thanks,
Andrei
