Re: Universities in the US - Garbage Collector for GNAT?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Well, there are certainly "evil" things you can do in Ada. It's never been
the least bit hard to write bad code in any language. Just for instance: Ada
gives you lots of direct access to the machine (machine code & addresses),
representations of data, multi-tasking, etc. Any of these things can be very
powerful if used judiciously. Its very easy to imagine how with multiple
tasks running in parallel and being used by someone unfamiliar with tasking
how it could easily make a program *very* difficult to maintain or debug!
(Just think of shared access by multiple threads to some resource.)

As for Garbage Collection: Observations by one or more compiler vendors seem
to indicate that while occasionally people make noise about it, nobody seems
to want it bad enough to make it a priority. Additionally, Ada typically
uses far less dynamically allocated memory and far fewer pointers than what
programmers commonly use in C/C++. Since in most garden variety programs the
bulk of allocation is static or off the stack, it is less of an issue.
Thirdly, lots of programmers when building their own dynamic data
structures, take advantage of Unchecked_Deallocation and Finalization to
clean up memory that might be hanging around, so garbage collection seems a
lot less necessary. (Assuming that for your implementation,
Unchecked_Deallocation ends up returning the memory to the system - it may
not...) Generally, it just doesn't seem important enough to create a strong
constituency.

Of course now I've probably just stepped into the doodoo and will be
scraping it off of my shoes for days. The GC fans will come out of the
woodwork and start explaining to me why the world is going to come to a halt
if we don't start the revolution and "Free The Mallocs!" :-) Oh well. Some
of these guys need the flame-bait or their blood starts to settle down at
their ankles.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Matthias Kretschmer" <McCratch@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:20010516210146.7f2a83ac.McCratch@gmx.net...
> Another I think, why Ada will get usefull in future, is that the projects
get larger and if you have more code to maintain it is hard if the language
allows tricks, like C and C++ do. The clarity of Ada-code makes it much
easier to maintain even code of other people. Even Java hasn't eliminated
all "evil" things yet. Ada does not have much nasty tricks (I didn't saw one
yet ...). But this brings me to another point - sometime ago there was a
thread about Garbage Collector for GNAT (just mentioned an existing one for
gnu c-compiler would work iirc) - someone has a working solution?
>
> mfg Matthias Kretschmer