Re: [Vala] reference management.

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Die, 2007-03-20 at 18:42 +0000, jamie wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 18:17 +0000, jamie wrote:
>
> > I would personally use GString (with ref counting patch to glib) as the
> > basic string type in vala as that this can be managed efficiently
> > without copying strings via default strong refs. Its also a lot faster
> > for string concatenation as it allocates extra memory for potential
> > string growth in chunks (using gslice I believe)
> >
> > For C interfacing, a cString type should be used with the compiler
> > automatically converting  from GString to cString just like Delphi does
> > with its strings.
>
> also the way delphi ref counts strings is to use copy-on-write so a
> string is only ever copied when its written (and never when its
> assigned) - this makes ref counted strings highly efficient and removes
> the need for the "weak" optimization with strings.

As our standard strings are considered constant, we'll do the same when
we have reference counted strings.

> In addition, isn't "weak" the same as const?

No, not quite. Consider for example const fields, they can only be
assigned once at initialization time, that limitation is not true for
weak fields.

Jürg