On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 14:10:19 UTC, Moritz Maxeiner wrote:
AFAICT that was mostly because it would have broken plenty of
existing code.
The validity or purposefulness of such code is up to debate, a
separate debate granted.
Let's assume there is working code that such a change will break.
Properly separating destruction and finalization from each
other with the current syntax remaining as finalizers and the
new one for destructors would allow this to be done without
major code breakage.
Sure, in the event D would like to transition towards a state
where the GC doesn't call finalizers, it seems useful.
From a marketing point of view having two destructors and
keyword/syntax just for this would be hard to defend, and it
would also need to explain the whole story.
Personally I'd be for:
~this() { /* deterministic one */ }
void finalize() { /* the one called by GC */ }
But then no transition path.
I'll defend the view point that there is _nothing_ useful to do
in a finalizer except to check if the destructor has already been
called.
