RE: How come Ada isn't more popular?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Ray Blaak writes:
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> > I'm primarily interested in destroying the entire structure, and often I
> > need no destruction at all: the structures exist until the termination
of
> > the program. There's no point of earlier cleanup in such programs, and
> > surely no point in non-zero overhead to support such cleanup. I'm not
aware
> > of any zero-overhead GC algorithm, because the basic tenet of GC is that
you
> > can find all reachable objects: doing that requires some time and/or
space
> > overhead.
>
> I don't think anyone anywhere claims zero-overhead for GC. The whole point
is
> reasonable performance (in fact competitive with manual management) and a
much
> easier job for the programmer, in situations with highly dynamic
> memory usage patterns.

That's the crux of the disagrement, I think. You claim that "highly dynamic
memory usage" is the normal case; I think it is *not* the usual case (or, at
least, doesn't have to be the usual case - languages like Java make it that
unnecessarily).

> At any rate, one uses the tools that fit their needs. If you find yourself
in
> situations with stable data structures, then it sounds like you don't need
GC,
> plain and simple, or maybe even any cleanup at all.

Right, but then why should it be a required and central part of general
purpose programming languages. Surely, it should be available as an option
for types that need it, but it certainly should not apply to all types.

My programs tend to be plenty dynamic after all, but the dynamic is in the
construction of the data structures. Destruction of them is unusual, and
usually happens in a single operation (not piecemeal). And locals and
temporaries are on the stack - no action at all is required to destroy them
(you keep refering to this as "manual management", but there is nothing
manual about it -- the compiler does all of the work).

                               Randy.