Re: Heap Memory Management Question(s)

[Florian Liekweg <liekweg@gmx.de>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> You might want to take a look at the (draft) Ada 2005 manual,
> which is available somewhere on www.adaic.com.
> 
> Also, John Barnes' book has a nice discussion of access types and
> storage pools and whatnot.
Thank you for the pointers!

> I removed the term "collection" from the Ada 95 RM, because [reason]
> [...]
> [...]  I don't think it's a good idea,
> especially now that we have storage pools.  In my experience,
> approximately zero access types are nested inside procedures
> anyway.
That's what I wanted to know, but I fear I have introduced a
misunderstanding here:

> I'm not sure what you mean by "left momentarily", [...]

Sorry for being unclear.  I was thinking of, e.g., a package variable,
which, as I understand, is not visible and/or accessible everywhere,
but it exists and keeps its state over the lifetime of the program.

My assumption is the following:
   We can momentarily leave the area where the variable is /visible/,
   but it stays in existence.  The lifetime of the object it points to
   can now span the entire program, not just the time the variable is
   visible.
My conclusion is: Visibility of the access type doesn't help when it
   comes to determining the lifetime of that object.  NB, it could
   of course /improve/ whatever analysis a sophisticated compiler
   might do.

> [...] hundreds of reasonable
> ways of managing heap memory, none of which is best for all purposes.
> [...]  storage pools [...]
Yes, indeed.  I am keeping an eye on Ada, because it seems to me
that it takes this subject more seriously than, e.g. C++ and friends,
and is not afraid to unload some of the work associated with it onto
the compiler.

-- Florian