On Wednesday, 29 August 2012 at 02:57:27 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
You would need a flag added to EVERY variable and item to specify if it was stack allocated or not. Otherwise it would be quite annoying to deal with. The compiler has to work blindly, assuming everything is correct. You can ref what you've been given but making more permanent references aren't possible without bypassing the safeguards.
To add on to this a little.. If you can only ref by calling, you ensure the variable is alive/valid when you are calling it regardless if it's stack or heap or global (But can't ensure it once the scope ends). Making a reference as a variable modifier won't work, but using a pointer you're already going lower level and it's all up to you the programmer to make sure it's right.
I think that's right; Otherwise ref wouldn't be allowed in @safe code (at all).
