Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> Now when I've worked with C/C++, GC seems like it would make a lot more 
> sense. There you *must* use pointers to just about everything and things 
> are easily dropped on the floor. Because of the extensive need for 
> pointers and malloc/free usage everywhere, it seems to make more sense 
> to have GC. But I don't know that there are lots of C++ compilers out 
> there supporting GC either.

When talking about memory leaks, it doesn't make any sense to talk
about "C/C++". There are aspects of C++ which were designed precisely
to handle the kinds of memory problems found in C. In particular, the
simple fact that destructors are always called for objects when their
lifetime ends means that most pointers will never be "dropped on the
floor". Memory leaks still happen, but mostly in complexly linked
data structures where ownership of pointers can become unclear.