Re: real-time Java

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

> Whether what they are reporting is due
> to the conceptual difficulty of
> programming for a garbage collecting
> language implementation,
> 
>   [GC, it should be emphasized, was
>   created mostly to overcome the
>   conceptual difficulty of programming
>   with explict new/dispose commands, and
>   if conceptual difficulty is still the
>   main problem, then garbage collection
>   is not yet a programming tool which
>   satisfies its design goal.]
> 
> or whether what they are reporting is
> due to inherent limitations of garbage
> collection technology today as a
> mechanism, or whether what they are
> reporting is the result of flawed GC
> implementations today, the problem still
> certainly exists.

Part of the problem is that Java wants to put (almost) everything in the
heap.  The GC would be faster if more data could be allocated in the
stack, or in registers.  Many GC'ed languages share this problem.

The C# language is nearly identical to Java, but one important
difference is that you can have stack-allocated structs.

- Bob