This Week in D March 1, 2015

Welcome to This Week in D! Each week, we'll summarize what's been going on in the D community and write brief advice columns to help you get the most out of the D Programming Language.

The D Programming Language is a general purpose programming language that offers modern convenience, modeling power, and native efficiency with a familiar C-style syntax.

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This Week in D is edited by Adam D. Ruppe. Contact me with any questions, comments, or contributions.

Statistics

20 bugs fixed
13 bugs and enhancement requests opened
32 pull requests merged into the language: 23 into DMD, 9 into Phobos, and 0 into druntime .
1 pull request merged into the website.

Major Changes

DIP74 was written and discussed. It looks probable that some variant on it will be implemented. DIP 74 proposes a reference counted class hierarchy. By implementing specially named methods in a class or interface, the compiler will consider objects of that type to be automatically reference counted.

These reference counted objects can not be implicitly converted to GC object types, meaning they will form, in effect, a parallel class hierarchy wherein the type system will help catch inappropriately escaping references. Coupled with DIP25, implemented last week, it should make sealed references possible with safe, deterministic freeing.

Discussion on the forum this week was dominated by this proposal, with people searching for holes in it and proposing optimizations to it. One such optimization was to elide reference increment and decrement in functions where the reference cannot escape, however this was shown to be easier said than proven. The thread is still ongoing at this time.

A likely candidate for refcounting in the standard library will be the Throwable or Exception classes.

In the community

Community announcements

See more at digitalmars.D.announce.

Significant Forum Discussions

The DIP74/Reference Counting discussion spanned several threads:
There were also user threads with competing proposals: My Reference Safety System (DIP???) and a complaint about the process.

See more at forum.dlang.org and keep up with community blogs at Planet D.

Upcoming events

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