[gclist] What to say about GC.

[Fergus Henderson]

Tom Lord wrote:
> 
> Did I mentioned the bugs yet?  A garbage collector must be maintained,
> ported to new platforms, and extended to deal with new data types.
> All of those are intricate and error-prone activities.

Yes, but they are activities which are performed by the garbage
collector implementor or the programming language implementor.  That's
a major advantage of garbage collection: the vast majority of the
difficult, low-level memory management stuff gets done by a few
programmers who are experts in that area, and their code is then reused
by thousands of other programmers who need worry about memory management
issues only very rarely at most.

> Some garbage
> collectors require programmers to follow strict conventions in their
> code or face GC errors.

That's definitely a problem, but it is one that can be addressed by
programming language designers.

> What is GC good for?

How about run-of-the-mill programs for which correctness and development
time are much more important than minimizing memory usage or squeezing
the last fraction of performance?

> "error-free memory management"?  Not even close.

I think you should try using a language designed with GC as the primary
means of memory management.  "Error-free memory management" may be an
exaggeration, but there are certainly languages which come pretty close
to that ideal.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.