On Tuesday, 15 July 2014 at 21:11:24 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Tuesday, 15 July 2014 at 20:03:15 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Monday, 14 July 2014 at 23:43:57 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:22:53PM +0000, John Carter via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
Any other good blog posts / social media comments / pointers
I can
digest and use?
This one came to mind:
http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
From the link above:
"It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using
shared pointers in particular) is better than garbage
collection. There is actual research* showing that the two
approaches are just two sides of the same coin. You should
realize that deleting a shared pointer may lead to an
arbitrary long pause in program execution, with similar
performance characteristics as a garbage sweep. It’s not only
because every serious reference counting algorithm must be
able to deal with cycles, but also because every time a
reference count goes to zero on a piece of data a whole graph
of pointers reachable from that object has to be traversed. A
data structure built with shared pointers might take a long
time to delete and, except for simple cases, you’ll never know
which shared pointer will go out of scope last and trigger it."
* http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf
I've been wondering about this. Could the following argument be
true?
Situations where automatic memory management are necessary are,
by definition, the situations where one cannot easily reason
about where memory freeing can occur. Therefore, no automatic
memory management system can be considered practically
predictable, unless you didn't* need it in the first place.
*strictly speaking
Which happens all the time in any codebase written by more than
one developer.
Developer attrition and third party libraries help to the entropy
of memory leak bugs.
Personally, I don't believe anyone is able to reason properly
about manual memory management, unless they wrote 100% of their
code, and don't work in more than one codebase.
--
Paulo
