On Tuesday, 3 March 2015 at 08:04:25 UTC, Manu wrote:
So, passing global x to some function; inc/dec x around the
function
call that it's passed to...? Then the stack has its own
reference, and
the global reference can go away safely.
Yes, the sane thing to do is to improve the general type system
and general optimizer. The special casing D is going for will
lead to no good. New non-trivial special case features just
punches more holes in the type system. Which is the opposite of
what is needed to bring D to a stable state.
By trivial I mean syntax sugar, which always is ok, but a type
system should be general with no special casing in it.
What you need to do is to a way to implement smart pointers as
non-ref-capable types, and the ability to do moves to transfer
ownership up the call stack, and good general opimizations in the
backends for it. AFAIK the current type system is too weak to
enforce it. The type system also lacks head-const-ref, which
often is needed for safe "manual optimization"?
The special casing effort is largely wasted because one cannot
have efficient ARC without whole program/module optimization
anyway. Swift ARC does better when optimizing larger units. With
whole program optimization, stronger typing and smart inlining
the RC performance issues can be reduced more efficiently.
It would be better to focus on ways to tighten the type system
and how to utilize stronger typing for optimization of larger
units (whole module/program). Special casing in the language
makes optimization algorithms harder to write. Long term evil.
