On Jun 24, 2009, at 09:14, Philip Aker wrote:
Like Gwynne, I'm comfortable with the traditional "reap what you sow" philosophy. This has benefits in that the basic policy spills over into other areas of programming and gradually, one learns as a matter of habit, to account for things all the time. This is good but can be lumped in with many other things learned from the school of hard knocks. With GC, the attitude is like one could fire a shotgun into a crowd and the walk away because the system will take responsibility for the consequences. Maybe you could say that's a moral issue. But it's certainly not something children should be taught in school.
I think we all have (pragmatically) a pretty good idea of where the morality of not killing and maiming people comes from. But where does the morality of explicitly releasing objects come from? Traditionally, releasing objects properly is *necessary*, and perhaps it is moral to bow to necessity. But reversing the argument -- arguing from the morality to the necessity, as you have done -- doesn't work.
In a nutshell, for folks like me who regularly use CFCreate … CFRelease in loops, what are the benefits of GC?
If CFCreate/CFRelease is precisely what you want to do, there are no benefits from GC, because the garbage collector isn't involved. Similarly, if you regularly use alloc/init ... release in loops, there are no benefits from using autorelease instead of release (in a non-GC app, I mean).
However, if the lifetime of the object you CFCreate is not strictly internal to the loop, then using (in a GC app) CFMakeCollectable once instead of futzing with CFRelease in multiple paths of execution might simplify your code greatly.
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