On Friday, 10 October 2014 at 21:54:32 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:
(a) gives users full control over how every function
allocates/manages memory (control).
(b) makes the implementation of those functions easy (simple).
(c) makes it easy to compose functions with different
management policies (expressive).
Probably the method would be to make garbage management an aspect
of the language itself, like how Go handles parallel processing
at the compiler level. Developers write everything like it's all
magically garbage collected, with maybe a few metatags/keywords
sprinkled around, and then tells the compiler what the default
garbage collection should be, and the garbage collector goes in
and rewrites code according to different strategies, including an
option for static-analysis based collection like Mercury.
D could potentially be moved that direction, but I would imagine
that adding reference versions of structs would be necessary
first, so that pointers became less prevalent, and pointers only
allowed in blocks marked dangerous where the programmer has to
perform any management himself.
