Again from the other thread. The are a few problems with mangling the type;
It breaks when you need to interact with libraries.
It's incompatible with struct alignment, and changes the struct size. These are very carefully managed properties of structures.
It obscures/complicates generic code.
It doesn't deal with circular references, which people keep bringing up as a very important problem.
What happens when a library receives a T* arg? Micro managing the ref-count at library boundaries sounds like a lot more trouble than manual memory management.
On 10/9/2013 7:30 AM, Manu wrote:
ARC. I've been here years now, and I see absolutely no evidence that the GC is
ever going to improve. I can trust ARC, it's predictable, I can control it.
Also, proper support for avoiding the GC without severe inconvenience as
constantly keeps coming up. But I don't think there's any debate on that one.
Everyone seems to agree.
I think we can get pretty close to ARC by using RefCounted, but you've indicated you disagree.
(Note that ObjC does not have a template system, and so using a library system was not possible for ObjC.)