While this research group's initial and foremost focus is on the future of lifetimes and reference counting in D, the existing owning types still need improvement. Though not safe from escapes (as Andrei has demonstrated) they, at the very least, prove to be a useful stopgap while new language work is done.

Unique and RefCounted have suffered from bit rot and should be revamped to remove some of their warts and historical restrictions. A few months back, I worked successfully with Martin Nowak, Dicebot, and Jakob Ovrum to fix up Unique (https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3139). Unfortunately it was backed out right before 2.068 due to a few lingering issues surrounding destruction of objects referenced via their interfaces. As far as I know, Martin did some later work at https://github.com/MartinNowak/phobos/tree/smartRefs before being drawn away by other concerns, and I disappeared due to some events in my personal life. Hopefully Martin sees this, as I'd love to coordinate and put what finishing touches remain to get Unique (hopefully followed by RefCounted) into an improved state, but I don't know how to best contact him "out of band".

You can find the dialogue surrounding these changes at the previously-linked PR (#3139), and also https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3225. I'd love to get feedback regarding the semantics discussed there.

_______________________________________________
Dlang-study mailing list
Dlang-study@puremagic.com
http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dlang-study