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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: If not Ada, what else...
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 21:54:58 -0700
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Date: 2015-07-29T21:54:58-07:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> It would be completely unnecessary to use any GC with the Ada containers. 

It just depends on what the program is doing--if the absence of GC
constrains how you organize your program, then you are missing out on
something by not having it.

Consider a multi-threaded program whose threads communicate through
async queues.  So a work request comes into one thread, it gets decoded
into a dictionary (container instance), and then the dictionary is
dropped onto a queue.  Another thread later picks it up and processes
it, sending the results through yet another queue.  This is a very
common way to write a Python or Erlang program.  But it means you can't
rely on syntactic scoping to know when a container is no longer in use.
You either have to carefully track where every reference might be, or
else use an automatic reclamation scheme (refcounts, GC, or whatever).