• Pillsy <pillsbury gmail.com> Nov 01 2010

Pillsy <pillsbury gmail.com> writes:

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
[...]
 (Why don't you post more often?)


I mostly post during lulls at work.

 I can't think of a case where someone just does it because 
 they know better.




 The typical case is value types of variable length: strings (the 
 built-in offering notwithstanding), BigInt, BigFloat, STL-style 
 containers, possibly even vectors and matrices (though that's almost 
 always a design mistake).


Right, that's sort of what I was thinking. I certainly don't think that
containers have the value-nature, and the attempt to force them into value-type
shaped holes is one of the aspects of the C++ STL that I'm not so crazy about. 

For strings, I already think D's solution is solid, and getting BigIntegers
right is something that really ought to be left up to the library. For other
more exotic "value types", where immutabilty or straight copies won't cut it, I
think, "Use reference counting and copy-on-write to implement value types of
variable size," would make a good point 47 when you get Scott Meyers to write
/Effective D/. Point 46 would of course be, "Don't make this(this) perform
expensive operations." :)

The important thing to my thinking is that `this(this)` gives programmers what
they need to do reference counting themselves when they need it to get their
value types right.

Cheers,
Pillsy