On Thursday, 13 November 2014 at 14:26:44 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
The important part is that owning, RC and GC types all need to know the allocators they belong to. In my example I need that to allow Owned types to be converted to RC types. In your proposal, something similar will ultimately be needed for merging the islands into specific heaps. The nice thing is that this scheme also allows for switching allocators on the fly at runtime, without template bloat, at the cost of virtual calls for using the allocators (which is probably an acceptable compromise for an inherently expensive thing like allocation).
If you have a owned type, you don't need a builtin RC type. As long as the wrapper that implement the RC own the RCed object, everything is safe. Also, this construct as the nice side effect that a single reference count can own a whole island instead of tracking all objects RC one by one.
