Re: Lacking of a ref-counted string.

[Hubert Figuiere <hfiguiere teaser fr>]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 20:47 -0400, Yu Feng wrote:
> First, it is very difficult to manage a string without a reference
> count. The current vala implementation is to assume that strings are
> immutable, and to copy the strings almost everywhere where increasing
> the ref-count should be used. The copying mechanism produces workable
> code, but doesn't work in a efficient way. This is where it hurts.

Maybe having a copy-on-write implementation (in Vala) of the string type
is what you want. That way, when you need mutability, you copy. That's
the choice made by std::string and Glib::ustring (in glibmm that is
incidentaly implemented using std::string) in C++ and transcribe pretty
well the usage case.


> Secondly, vala doesn't introduce any additional dependency other than
> GLib, to implement it in VALA level, the only way is to embed it in
> the
> compiler. A compiler with embeded code to do a ref-counted string
> doesn't sound nice. This is why I think it should be done at GLib
> level.

That's a design choice, but it seem to be unavoidable to have a runtime
library at one point. All the other language have one, more or less.
Pascal, Java (libcj), Objective-C, Fortran, C++ and even C. I guess it
is no exception for Vala.



Hub