On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 04:16:11 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
If we go these DIP road, there is no coming back and this will get in the way of a principled approach.
Then come up with an alternative DIP which shows a better way to solve this. As it stands, it looks likely that we'll end up with some form of DIP 74, and if you have a better proposal, then now is probably the time to do it.
Personally, I obviously haven't been following this closely enough, because I don't understand why something like RefCounted can't be made to do what we need with regards to reference counting and classes. It does get a bit nasty when inheritance and whatnot get involved, but C++ was able to solve that easily enough, and we should be able to do the same.
The one place in-language where I'm sure that something like RefCounted doesn't do it is exceptions, since we really should have a way to make those reference counted, but you can only throw something derived from Throwable - which means a class and not a wrapper around one. So, we need a tweak of some kind to the language there, but that's pretty specific, whereas it _should_ be possible to get something like RefCounted to at least solve the normal cases. Clearly though, Walter and Andrei have come to the conclusion that it's not.
- Jonathan M Davis
