RAII is misleading

[bitwise via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 19:22:46 UTC, bitwise wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 18:22:12 UTC, duff wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 17:03:47 UTC, bitwise wrote:
>>> Then, during recursive serialization, if you found an object 
>>> which was already in the table, you wouldn't serialize it 
>>> again.
>>
>> But this doesn't give the guarentee that the real citizen who 
>> responsible to tell the client "hey i've got the ref" can do 
>> it. With RC, the real owner may not know that his resource is 
>> stolen by a children.
>
> The way that I was dealing with this at the time was requesting 
> resources(files) from a shared repository by name. The 
> repository would either load the file and instantiate the 
> appropriate object, or return the object if it already existed. 
> So, no node in the graph ever really owned a resource. All 
> resources were owned by one central repository. Now, this was 
> only enforced by convention, so I suppose someone could call 
> delete on the shared_ptr's internal pointer, but making this 
> strictly enforced through language features is difficult, if at 
> all possible without major comprimises.
>
> There is some discussion about this idea in the dlang Study 
> forum. They're trying to figure out how to implement ref 
> counting in D in a totally @safe way(impossible to currupt 
> memory). I think that some major comprimises will have to be 
> made, and I personally wohld rather deal with this issue 
> through good coding conventions.
>
>    Bit

I should add that the repository stored references to the 
resources as weak_ptrs so when the resources went out of scope, 
they would be deleted. Similar systems may also choose to keep 
these resources around, even with a ref count of zero, and only 
delete them when more new resources were requested and memory ran 
low. This would be a much more comicated approach though.