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From: jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: c++ vs ada results
Message-ID: <1991Jun26.003514.24925@netcom.COM>
Date: 26 Jun 91 00:35:14 GMT
References: <1991Jun18.041751.3740@netcom.COM> <1991Jun18.122812.18190@eua.ericsson.se> <3776@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au> <1991Jun25.002928.16897@eve.wright.edu>
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  UNIX System {408 241-9760 guest}
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

>In fact, it can be argued that since it is
>optional for compiler vendors to implement garbage collection in the 
>compiler runtime support, designing reusable components for Ada is *more* 
>difficult. Any component that creates and destroys many instances during 
>execution must itself perform the garbage collection.  The designer of
>such a component must take this into account during design and during
>implementation.  All "object oriented" languages I'm familiar with
>(Smalltalk, C++, Eiffel) provide garbage collection to remove this
>burden from the programmer.

Is this really true for C++? I believe one of the reasons for providing
constructors and destructors was to supply the programmer with explicit
control over initialization and finalization, so that memory-safe non-
leaky implementations could be constructed. I've never heard anybody
claim before that without any effort on the programmer's part, garbage
collection is automatically taken care of in C++ (I've heard of it
being taken care of automatically in LISP, and not well...). Sure, on
a UNIX box one can semi-safely ignore garbage issues, but that's just
because the problem is swept under the carpet of job control--at
some level the kernel is still having to deal with garbage collection,
memory fragmentation, etc.
-- 
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