User:Schuetzm/scope
What's this about?
Taking addresses of local variables is currently not allowed @safe code. [1] This is, however, a very broad restriction, that disallows many useful idioms. Examples include slicing of local arrays, passing local structures by reference for efficiency reasons, out parameters, and allocators with limited lifetimes. Additionally, GC avoidance techniques like reference counting and unique/owned objects need some kind of borrowing to work efficiently, to avoid the costs of reference incrementing/decrementing or move semantics, while at the same time still being provably memory safe.
The language already designates the scope concept for that purpose, but as of today it is unimplemented, and the original concept is generally seen as insufficient. This proposal intends to extend the design of scope and define it's semantics to be usable for the above-mentioned purposes.
Lifetimes
An important concept is that of the lifetime. Any object exists for a specific period of time, with a well defined beginning and end point: from the point it is created (constructed), to the point it is released. A reference that points to an object whose lifetime has ended is a dangling reference. Use of such references can cause all kinds of errors, and must therefore be prevented.
Because the lifetimes of actual manually managed objects are complex and unpredictable, a different concept of lifetime is hereby introduced, that only applies to named variables and is based purely on their lexical scope and order of declaration. By the following rules, a hierarchy of lifetimes is defined:
- A variable's lifetime starts at the point of its declaration, and ends with the lexical scope it is defined in.
- An (rvalue) expression's lifetime is temporary; it lives till the end of the statement that it appears in. (FIXME: provide a reference)
- The lifetime of A is higher than that of B, if A appears in a higher scope than B, or if both appear in the same scope, but A comes lexically before B. This matches the order of destruction of local variables.
- The lifetime of a function parameter is higher than that of that function's local variables, but lower than any variables in higher scopes. (FIXME: relative lifetimes among function parameters == order of destruction)
