On Thursday 06 October 2016 00:16:22 Tony Whyman wrote: > On 05/10/16 23:03, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: > > Martin Schreiber recently mentioned in another Interface discussion that > > there is a very good reason he doesn’t use COM style interfaces… > > Reference Counting! > > Used properly reference counted interfaces are very powerful and allow > for some very elegant programming. Do you complain about AnsiStrings? > They are reference counted. Would you really want to have to free every > string explicitly? Dynamic arrays are similarly reference counted. > Reference counting is great for simple types like strings and dynamic arrays but is a nightmare with the venturesome mixture of COM-interface and classes from Delphi. Even reference counting for complex classes is no good idea IMO, I fear the times when FPC will implement ARC. I don't think that a programming language should hide more and more of the internal working of the code he writes from the programmer. Take a look at the modern C++ programs; the LLVM-compiler is a good example. It is horrific slow. Stepping through the code shows that there are complex multi-level dynamic type conversion and dataaccess routines at almost every statement. The typical C++ programmer does not need to care about because the programming language takes care for the boring tasks. The typical C++ programmer actually *does* not care about performance because competing programs are not faster; they are written in a modern programming language too... Recently I had to revive my stone old AMD-K6 PC with Windows 95. What marvel, that relict with its age-old applications provides a better user experience, is snappier, more convenient and more productive than my newest Linux machine with the modern desktops and applications.
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