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From: "Jonas Nygren" <ehsjony@ehs.ericsson.se>
Subject: Garbage Collection in Ada
Date: 1996/10/13
Message-ID: <01bbb910$f1e73f60$829d6482@joy.ericsson.se>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 189155216
organization: Ericsson
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-13T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>



Recently there has been some topics that has touched on the issue
of Garbage Collection, GC, in Ada. I peronally think it would be great to
have
GC in Ada and I am not sure why there is such resistance. I have a couple
of questions on this GC issue.

Many claim GC is not well suited for real-time applications - well if it is
possible at all to implement GC in Ada then it is just a question of making
the GC feature optional. This could be accomplished by compile-time
'switches' to turn GC on or off. Or one could use the same strategy as
for Ada.Finalization, e.g.:

package Garbage_Collection is
   type Collected is tagged private;
   ....
end Garbage_Collection;

Is there more to the real-time issue. Is it not sufficient to make GC
optional?

Probably the greatest obstacle is to implement GC. I have tried to study
some of the papers available and at times I believe I understand the
different approaches available but I soon lose clarity when I try to
understand
how one would go about to implement it. My understanding of compiler
technology and internals is way low.

So my second question: Is it at all possible to implement GC in Ada ?
(with a reasonable effort, whatever that is),

/jonas