On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 07:23:57 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 07:22:51 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
Well, you CAN indeed, create a dumbed down language that is
memory safe and don't require a GC.
Yeah, that's 1 of my 2 points.
The other one you still ignored: the GC doesn't bring much to
the table. (Re C# Java etc.)
There is a point being made here that is perfectly valid. There
is a form of memory leak that a GC can never catch, such as when
when memory is allocated and simply never deallocated by mistake
due to a persistent "in use" pointer that should have been nulled
but wasn't.
In addition, the GC itself may fail to deallocated freed memory
or even free live memory by mistake. I've seen bugs described to
that effect. There simply is no panacea to the memory leak
problem. What a GC does do, is free the programmer from a ton of
tedium, and even allow for constructs that would normally not be
practical to implement, but it can never guarantee anything more
than that.
--rt
