• bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> Jun 20 2011

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer:

 But my immediate question is -- is it better to half-fix the problem by  
 committing my changes, or leave the issue alone?


I suggest to leave the issue alone.


 Any solution that fixes the GC problem will have to store the typeinfo  
 somehow associated with the block.  I think we may have more traction for  
 this problem with a precise GC.
 
 I don't think the right route is to store type info inside the struct  
 itself.  This added overhead is not necessary for when the struct is  
 stored on the stack.


 This is a possibility, making a struct only usable if it's inside another  
 such struct or inside a class, or on the stack.


Given that D is a system language, and the general usefulness and ubiquity of
structs, a third possibility is to do both and add an attribute to help
enforcing what can't be done on PODs, or add more runtime info _on request_
where the programmer wants more flexible structs. This solves the situation,
but has the disadvantage of increasing D complexity a little.

Bye,
bearophile