[gclist] What to say about GC

[Marc Shapiro]

 || From: leichter@smarts.com (Jerry Leichter)
 || Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 10:14:33 -0400
 || Subject: Re: [gclist] What to say about GC.
 || 
 || I recently had a battle with a bug that illustrates both sides of the
 || arguments here.
 || 
 || The bug was in code for an OO database, and manifested itself as random
 || failures when attempting to restore from a checkpoint.  It turned out that
 || the person who implemented the restore code had neglected to clear a
 || pointer to an object that describes a pending transaction.

It sounds like what you are objecting to is that your database does not
implement persistence by reachability.  The transaction object should have
persisted, since there is a reachable pointer in the database to it.  Of
course the real bug is that this pointer should not exist at all (since a
transaction object is intended to be transient).

                                                Marc