On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 09:08:40 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
On 1/9/2013 1:00 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Wednesday, January 09, 2013 09:54:10 Mehrdad wrote:
You (or Walter I guess) are the first person I've seen who
calls
C++ garbage collected.
I sure wouldn't call that garbage collection - not when
there's no garbage collector. But Walter has certainly called
it that from time to time.
There's a collector, it's in the refcount decrement (a little
simplified):
if (refcount == 0)
free(obj);
Granted, it's terribly simple, but it's there.
Sure, it's there.
The problem I have with it is that this line of reasoning makes
no sense of what Walter said, which was:
"A GC is *required* if you want to have a language that
guarantees memory safety."
No matter how he defines the word GC, I _STILL_ don't see how
this is true.
I can perfectly well imagine a language which allows you to use
integers as _handles_ to objects (perfectly _manual_ management
of _everything_), and which gives you access to their fields via
external functions.
The language need not give you any direct access to memory,
making everything perfectly safe.
I really don't think Walter's statement made any sense whatsoever.
