[fpc-pascal] Fwd: What to do to get new users

[Martin Frb]

On 19/10/2024 14:20, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
>
> The bigger problem though is now everyone is forced to use ARC on new 
> projects and the old RTL is frozen in time. This is very bad of course 
> and deal breaker.
>

And actually: ARC, are we talking the simple version => just a refcount, 
and it will fail as soon as you have circular refs?
Or the complex system, that needs to do more involved checks, and may at 
times take more time?

Because if the latter, well I know some people who would shot the person 
introducing that in a high performance software...

Actually, if we are talking safety (rather than comfort for the 
developer) then we may not need ARC at all. Because freeing memory is 
not the only (nor biggest?) worry. Running out of mem (and handling it 
gracefully, and without vulnerability)  is important too. But ARC 
doesn't solve that.
One way to solve that is pre-allocate any mem that may be needed, and 
then never free or alloc any mem thereafter. And then you need no ARC at 
all.
And then counting references is just an unnecessary overhead.

So how does something become a deal breaker, if it should not be needed 
at all?