On Tuesday, 10 April 2012 at 09:52:45 UTC, simendsjo wrote:
On Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:27:19 +0200, CrudOMatic
<crudoma...@gmail.com> wrote:
hmmmm... so no need for a generic object reference counter.
Nice. I was trying to approach it from a literal sense (e.g.
card moves from deck to player's hand) - when you do the
popBack() is that object returned and deleted from the
original array, or just the reference returned and ref removed
from original array?
The reference is returned, and it's still in the array - kind
of... Say:
cards is [Card1, Card2]
cards.popBack();
cards is now [Card1], but Card2's reference is still there in
position 2. The length of the array in decremented.
If you try to append a card to cards, the runtime will see
you're trying to write over the reference for Card2, so it will
create a new array to avoid this.
If you use assumeSafeAppend, you say that you don't mind
overwriting this reference.
Remember that as long as you hold a reference to Card2
somewhere, the GC won't delete the instance even if the
reference no longer exists in the cards array.
I was trying to use literal real-world ideas of objects, and
was wanting the moving so I didn't have weird issues later
down the road, like not knowing why a reference was hanging
around. I understand D has a GC, but sometimes it pays to do
management yourself.
A card game doesn't sound like heavy use of the GC, so I don't
think that should be a problem.
Awesome. One last question, does popFront() have the same effect
of decreasing length - or should I avoid popFront()?
