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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Garbage Collection in Ada
Date: 1996/10/20
Message-ID: <dewar.845840549@merv>#1/1
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references: <01bbb910$f1e73f60$829d6482@joy.ericsson.se>
 <Pine.GSO.3.93.961017160658.10939A-100000@sky.net> <dewar.845608007@merv>
 <199610181934142408603@dialup101-3-15.swipnet.se> <DzL6xB.Lwz@world.std.com>
organization: New York University
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-20T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Robert Duff said

"You do have a point, though.  For example, many compilers use hash
tables, which are intolerably slow in the worst case.  And the compiler
designer often doesn't do any analysis to determine the probability of
that happening.  Just wait until somebody complains, and then fix it."

Well not so intolerable, there is a big difference btween compiling one
program slower by a relatively small linear factor, and blowing up in
an application at runtime because you ran out of memory. As I said
before, if the only consequnece of not collecting garbage is to slow
things down (e.g. by using more virtual memory swapping), then the two
cases are indeed comparable.