Re: memory leakages with Ada?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

In comparing Ada to C on this there are two observations: One is that Ada
provides a different model for dynamic allocation than does C that includes,
among other things, a lot more checks/safety features to minimize the
possibility of lost memory. (Still, the standard doesn't require garbage
collection so you can still leak memory if you mess things up.) It isn't
impossible to leak memory in Ada - just less likely.

The other thing is that stylistically, Ada tends to do things off of the
stack or global memory rather than require lots of dynamic allocation. Short
of building your own linked data structures, you generally almost *never*
create things via dynamic allocation. (Constrast this with C where you
routinely do dynamic allocation of strings or structs and routinely manage
pointers to all sorts of things.) If you find you are constantly dynamically
allocating things in your Ada programs, you are probably not doing it The
Ada Way (trying to translate C into Ada?) and need to rethink what you're
doing.

As a result, memory leaks are far less frequent in Ada programs, so you'll
save lots of nasty debugging time.

As for interfacing to C - the C code is free to leak all the memory it wants
so you get no guarantees. It may also depend on the compiler(s) in question.

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/

"Calvin Ow" <calvow@cyberway.com.sg> wrote in message
news:3c90af1e@news.starhub.net.sg...
> Hi,
> Has Ada got any memory leakage problems like that of C?
> Especially with the use of Pragma calls to C?
>
>