Re: Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector and GNAT

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

The thing I don't get is why this whole issue of garbage collection 
seems to periodically poke up in the first place. In the applications I 
have been involved with that did any form of dynamic allocation to begin 
with, we typically implemented some low-level data structures (lists, 
stacks, queues, whatever) and got those working reliably and then never 
dealt with it again. Secondly, they usually used Unchecked_Deallocation 
which was either properly supported such that memory got returned to the 
OS or it never seemed to have an effect with respect to memory leaks. 
Thirdly, nobody seems to be in such dire need of it that they are 
willing to pay anyone to create it in their compilers or we'd see it 
implemented somewhere. Finally, if we were to get a standard library of 
some sort that created/managed the customary containers one would 
expect, it would seem that they should not leak memory, much as dynamic 
strings in Ada manage to do their job without leaking memory.

Maybe we could put this one to rest permanently by getting some kind of 
general consensus that Ada just plain doesn't need it. Or by claiming 
that "Any *Competent* Ada Programmer" doesn't let memory leak. :-)

MDC

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> 
> 
> Does that paper say _Ada_ programmers spend that much time ?
> 
> If so, then programmers for some other languages must spend 110% of their
> time debugging memory managment issues.


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Marin David Condic
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