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From: "Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How-to on using the adacl-gc packages
Date: 14 May 2006 11:26:09 -0700
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Date: 2006-05-14T11:26:09-07:00
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As for rationales against garbage collection in Ada, you'll probably
hear more along these lines:

Ada is a language intended to be used to engineer high quality, high
reliability software. Garbage Collection generally is a tool to that is
used to cover up a failure to know and control your program. An
application should be written in such a way that there are no memory
leaks or memory kept allocated after you've finished using it.

Developing very high quality software requires active engineering on
the part of the programmer / designer, not a adding a tool that tries
to clean up the mess after you've created it.  In Ada, you're not
supposed to create a "mess" (though it's perfectly possible to make a
mess of a program in Ada just as in any programming language).

While I don't completely subscribe to this line of thinking, I do think
that before including garbage collection in an Ada program, you should
carefully review _why_ you want to use it (instead of maintaining
positive memory control throughout the application) and you should be
very sure you can live with the impact of garbage collection on the
timing and other performance requirements of the program.

Steve

Erik J Pessers wrote:
>
...
>
> Also: any general feelings on whether including
> garbage collection is something to really worry
> about in practice?
> ...