From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,b99897135d6631cc X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!spamkiller2.gnilink.net!gnilink.net!nwrdny03.gnilink.net.POSTED!c2bfcbcf!not-for-mail Subject: Re: memory management and productivity Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <40d69121$1_1@baen1673807.greenlnk.net> From: "Ed Falis" Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; delsp=yes; charset=us-ascii MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: User-Agent: Opera M2/7.51 (Linux, build 689) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 13:45:12 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 151.203.21.234 X-Complaints-To: abuse@verizon.net X-Trace: nwrdny03.gnilink.net 1088257512 151.203.21.234 (Sat, 26 Jun 2004 09:45:12 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 09:45:12 EDT Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1919 Date: 2004-06-26T13:45:12+00:00 List-Id: 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