On 21 Feb, 16:37, Nicola Musatti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > While attempting to dereference a null reference is a rather common > mistake in languages such as Java and C# - I'm not sure about Python - > the one invaluable guarantee provided by the garbage collector is the > absence of *invalid* references. This is one of the reasons why > there's an ongoing effort to add garbage collection to the C++ > standard, albeit in an optional form.
The main reason why C++ has declined in usage is because almost everything of practical value is optional. Meanwhile, those C++ newbies we were talking about are having to deal with decisions that everyone else can quite happily ignore, knowing that the right choice has probably already been made for them, where automatic memory management is probably the right choice for the biggest decision of them all, as Java demonstrated quite successfully to the hordes of enterprise programmers (and their managers) at the end of the 1990s. Back to those C++ newbies, then. Of course, none of them pushed into a C++ project is going to have much say about which memory management "best practice" is going to be used - the decisions are already set in stone by the project - and so it's all about coping with the tedious tracking of "who owns which pointer" and hoping that different libraries don't have different policies. Taking the quotes out of order... > At least C++ programmers tend to know that memory > must be managed, while newbies in other languages are often lead to > believe - wrongly - that the garbage collector takes care of > everything. Sure, there are some issues with memory consumption patterns with various garbage collectors, but the "it's good for you" attitude has scant justification unless you're dealing with constrained environments. And even with people watching the dials in their C++ application, you still get obscene resource misuse, which is why Firefox eventually consumes over 1GB memory on this desktop. There are considerably fewer caveats involved with regard to languages with garbage-collected runtime environments. I seem to remember that Hans Boehm had some interesting observations about garbage collection myths, especially around performance, but since the mindset persists in large tracts of the C++ development landscape that it must somehow be cheating to use a garbage collector, I suppose we still have a few more years of applications accessing the wrong memory locations and showing the usual useless backtrace dialogues for submission to uninterested developers who insisted on using C++ because "everything else is slow". Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
