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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: memory management in Ada: tedious without GC?
References: 
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Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 20:56:50 +0200
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Date: 2008-05-16T20:56:50+02:00
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"jhc0033@gmail.com" <jhc0033@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm mostly soliciting answers from Ada programmers who know C++ RAII
> well (Skip this if you use the words "C" and "C++" interchangeably,
> please. Your answers will be misleading at best):
>
> As I understood from reading the Memory Management section of
> Wikibooks on Ada, Ada's memory management facilities are roughly
> equivalent to
>
> a. C++-like "new"
> b. C++-like "delete"
> c. Java-like "finally"
> d. your implementation may or may not have GC
>
> Did I misunderstand?

No, but you didn't get the entire picture.

> To me, this seems much, much more error-prone and tedious that C++'s
> RAII approach, where you almost never have to worry about deallocation
> (i.e. "b" and "c" above), even in the presence of exceptions, unless
> you have GC. Besides, RAII applies to a bunch of other things, like
> thread locks, database connections, files - not just memory.

Read up on "controlled types" and, in the ARM, on Ada.Finalization, as
well as "storage pools".  That will complete your understanding of
Ada's memory management.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.