Regions tradeoffs

In the last few posts I’ve been discussing various options for regions. I’ve come to see region support as a kind of continuum, where the current system of reference modes lies at one end and a full-blown region system with explicit parameterized types and user-defined memory pools lies at the other. In between there are various options. To better explore these tradeoffs, I wrote up a document that outlines various possible schemes and also details use cases that are enabled by these schemes. I don’t claim this to be a comprehensive list of all possible schemes, just the ones I’ve thought about so far. In some cases, the descriptions are quite hand-wavy. I also think some of them don’t hang together so well.