Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

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

You may be right, but at the end of the day, here's the benefit of my 
experience: I've been using Ada for 20 years in one capacity or another. 
I've written big, databasey-workstationish applications for 
VAX/ALPHA/VMS, Unix and PC platforms. I've done hard realtime embedded 
Ada code for a variety of systems. I've hacked thousands of little 
one-shot fixit tools or utilities. Some apps have made extensive use of 
dynamic data structures and others not at all. In all these cases, I've 
never once felt even the slightest bit deprived by not having a compiler 
that had GC. (Its possible one of them might have had it - I never 
noticed.) Hence, I find it difficult to understand why people regularly 
bring up GC as some sort of "significant shortcoming" of Ada.

Maybe there is some problem domain in which the algorithms tend to 
depend on GC being around. Midieval Botswainian Lute Music Pattern 
Recognition, perhaps? But generally, if you build your data structures 
correctly, you're properly managing the storage anyway and GC should not 
be an issue. I don't get why it always seems to be one with some folks - 
yet never enough so that it really motivates adding it to some compiler.

MDC


Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> 
> Not quite true.  There is a more subtle problem.  There have been many 
> Ada compilers that supported GC over the years, but in every case except 
> possibly Symbolics, the general purpose garbage collection didn't get 
> exercised enough and eventually died due to "bit rot".*  (The extra cost 
> of supplying a garbage collector, such as a garbage collected storage 
> pool for Ada 95 is that you have to test it by forcing garbage 
> collection by exhausting storage space every time you modify the 
> compiler.  This gets old fast.  And calling the GC routines specifically 
> is not enough.)
> 

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Marin David Condic
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