[fpc-devel] Defer keyword

[Ryan Joseph]

> On May 7, 2021, at 2:46 AM, Sven Barth via fpc-devel <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
> 
> I cannot speak for others, but I think 90% of potential use cases for ref counting
> would be covered like this in my code: objects that only live inside a
> procedure.
> 
> I think the same. 

There's also a function which returns dynamically allocated memory but doesn't intend for you to keep it around very long. Cocoa/Objective-C has a good system for this which is an "autorelease pool" and while it's not language construct but rather a runtime system it does rely on an "Any" type (called id in Objective-C) so that methods can be chained together  like this:

a := TArray.Create([1,2,3]).AutoRelease;

We can't do this in Pascal because the AutoRelease functions return type is not compatible with the type of the caller. Could we add something like an "Any" return type to Pascal which is a type that is compatible with any class? This relies on an event loop that can capture this garbage and dispose of it but it goes a LONG way in helping with common memory management problems.

Regards,
	Ryan Joseph