Re: C bug of the day

["Terje Slettebø" <tslettebo@chello.no.nospam>]

<kanze@gabi-soft.fr> wrote in message
news:d6652001.0306160216.59fa74d6@posting.google.com...
>
> I know that in many cases, garbage collection isn't an option.  This
is
> probably particularly true in the type of applications where Ada is
most
> used (although it isn't the case of the uses of Ada I'm familiar
with).
> Still, it is the safer option; IMHO, it should be on by default, but
> with options to turn it off.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that it appears
that some think that if you have garbage collection, you won't have to
do memory management. It's true that you can't completely leak memory,
but you can still get the effect of memory leak, resulting from large
structures still having a reference to them, but which are otherwise
unused.

This has also resulted in a host of new kinds of references for dealing
with it, such as weak, soft and phantom references (in Java). Memory
leak-like conditions also have expressions like lapsed listener,
lingerers, laggards and limbo.

Garbage collection just changes the problems you meet to something else,
and not necessarily easier. Garbage collection might make it harder to
manage resources, not easier.

Besides, memory is just one kind of resource, and GC does nothing for
other kinds. For languages without stack-allocated objects, like Java,
you can't use RAII in its usual form, either (use of
constructor/destructor). Instead, you have to resort to
try-catch-finally, which can lead to spaghetti code, if you have several
objects to clean up this way.


Regards,

Terje

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