Re: memory leakages with Ada?

[john.mccabe@emrad.ns.com (John McCabe)]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 15:12:21 -0500, "Marin David Condic"
<dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote:

>In comparing Ada to C on this there are two observations: One is that Ada
>provides a different model for dynamic allocation than does C that includes,
>among other things, a lot more checks/safety features to minimize the
>possibility of lost memory. (Still, the standard doesn't require garbage
>collection so you can still leak memory if you mess things up.) It isn't
>impossible to leak memory in Ada - just less likely.

One of the things I've found recently, since starting to use C++ more,
is that Ada.UncheckedDeallocation is so much nicer than 'delete' as it
returns you a nice, null pointer! 'delete' in C++ appears to remove
the allocated block, but leave your pointer pointing to where it used
to be!

>The other thing is that stylistically, Ada tends to do things off of the
>stack or global memory rather than require lots of dynamic allocation. Short
>of building your own linked data structures, you generally almost *never*
>create things via dynamic allocation. (Constrast this with C where you
>routinely do dynamic allocation of strings or structs and routinely manage
>pointers to all sorts of things.) If you find you are constantly dynamically
>allocating things in your Ada programs, you are probably not doing it The
>Ada Way (trying to translate C into Ada?) and need to rethink what you're
>doing.

I'm not convinced this comment is 100% valid, from having worked on
large scale Object-Oriented Ada projects over the last 3 years or so
where there has been significant (if not huge) amounts of dynamic
allocation. It is at least partially true in that you can often
restructure your code to avoid dynamic allocation, but...