On Thursday, 18 November 2021 at 13:38:58 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 21:59:51 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 21:46:45 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>The GC isn't going anywhere. It's the easiest way to write memory-safe code other than leaking everything.
What is the plan for destructors?
Objects with destructors should not be allocated on the GC-heap. Will this become a type error that is caught at compile time?
No plans right now. Refresh my memory: what are the main issues?
Off the top of my head:
-
The main issue is that beyond the trivial examples destruction order matters and you need to keep objects alive to get the correct cleanup of resources. Think database/transaction, GPU/texture, etc. So if you assume RAII for aggregates, then aggregates written for those won't work with GC. Though you could support both by adding finalizer handlers, then you could deny GC allocation of objects with destructor and no finalizer handler. (just one possibility)
-
Performance of GC collection will be faster if you have no destructors. Especially if you move to local GC heap (per actor). Then you can just release the whole heap and do no scanning when the actor is done. If the average actor's lifespan is short and you have plenty of memory, the GC overhead will drop from "O(N)" to "O(1)" (average).
Might be other issues.