Re: Garbage Collection in Ada

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <Pine.GSO.3.93.961014050707.23547A-100000@sky.net> John Howard <jhoward@sky.net> writes:

> GC just provides *automatic* deallocation of "unreachable" dynamically
> allocated objects.  GC is not cost-free.  Ada 95 flexibly provides a
> programmer with capable mechanisms to manually manage memory.  Plus the

In many cases these are not really sufficient without herculian
efforts.  I've been there.


> safeguards of Ada help minimize creating slop to clean up and so the
> deallocation can likely be managed easily enough manually.  I am not 
> against using GC if its reliability is guaranteed and it saves me some 
> money.  Otherwise I prefer to manually control the deallocation.

Fine.  Then just don't use it.


> You argue that GC is already worthwhile for the culture of C++ 
> programming.  Perhaps it is most cost-effective if an operating system
> does GC instead of having several programs doing their own GC.  That seems
> to be a goal of the Java Virtual Machine.

A worthy goal.  But not something any viable OS is going to provide
anytime soon.

> > Lars Farm, lars.farm@ite.mh.se:
> > Ada allows GC, C++ doesn't even acknowledge its existence.  One would
> > have thought that the stricter Ada would be easier to adapt to GC than
> > the "sloppy" C++.

Lars, what on Earth (or anywhere else) makes you think otherwise??


> I argue that GC is far less worthwhile for the culture of Ada programming.
> (Similarly Ada spared us from needing an equivalent C Lint program to 
> clean up code).

Come on.  While it is less useful in several cases, it is still
extremely useful in many typical cases.  Unless you so narrowly define
Ada programming as to exclued all those application areas.  I sure
don't want to do this.


/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com