Re: memory management and productivity

["Ed Falis" <falis@verizon.net>]

On 25 Jun 2004 16:35:53 -0700, Russ <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com> wrote:

> Yup. Look at the amazing popularity of Java. I would venture to say
> that it is due, in large part, to Java's garbage collection.


Unfortunately, there are counter-arguments to this conjecture, anyway.

Consider Eiffel, a very nice language, quite Ada-like in many ways, with  
garbage collection and several innovative features (eg design by  
contract).  It is not as popular or as widely used as Ada.

Consider that both Aonix (from Intermetrics/Averstar) and AdaCore provided  
Ada compilers for the JVM, including garbage collection and robust  
bindings to the  Java class libraries.  Neither was commercially  
successful.

Consider that when I was at Aonix, I built a setup allowing the use of the  
Great Circle garbage collector with ObjectAda, and that we advertized the  
availability of this capability.   One copy of GC was sold with ObjectAda  
if I remember rightly.

So, IMO, garbage collection is a nice option to have, but I doubt that  
it's of the essence of Java's popularity.

By the way, I happen to enjoy programming in languages that provide GC,  
and was pretty heavily involved in almost all of the above.

- Ed