DavePearce/Whiley — Issue #56: Reimplement Runtime Data Types
Author: DavePearce
Created: 2011-11-01 03:36:11+00:00
State: open

Currently, the compound runtime data types (i.e. List, Set, etc) extends Collection implememtations. This is actually ineffecient for a number of reasons:

1. Methods for adding/removing items are dynamically dispatched, when they don't need to be.
2. Reference counting is slightly more awkward that it needs to be.

Therefore, it makes sense to reimplement them from scratch, and to inherit from a special ReferenceCounted class. This will have methods for incrementing and decrementing the reference count. All other members for the given datatypes will be static (for efficiency).