Re: Garbage collection in C++

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:07:02 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<f0161c69-c7ec-4615-8e32-2c5a44275375@i18g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 18, 5:57 am, Keith H Duggar <dug...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

On Nov 17, 4:28 am, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 16, 11:46 pm, hurcan solter <hsol...@gmail.com> wrote:

although it is not strictly necessary , it has its uses
with concurrent programming it may get really confusing
the manage the lifetime of objects when multiple threads


Attention! Garbage collection does NOT manage the lifetime
of objects. It only manages memory.


Attention! In practice the above is FALSE!


Apparently, then, you don't even know what garbage collection
does. Garbage collection manages memory. It does NOT manage
object lifetime. The two are different things (and the C++
standard very decisively keeps them separate).

If it were correct there would not have been the rather
lengthy discussion recently in comp.lang.c++.moderated among a
few of the world's foremost C++ experts regarding "zombie"
states etc.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/browse_frm/thr...

(Don't be fooled by the topic. It was a Trojan Horse bearing
the gift of GC. For example see the subthread starting with
post 63. If the link fails search for "throwing default
constructors".)

When one tries to divorce, in practical terms, the concepts of
object "lifetime" and object "storage" the can opens and
spills worms all over your language model. Since you did not
post in that recent thread I'm not sure what your solution for

   "destroyed but not deallocated"

is. If you have one please post it so that Andrei and the like
can employ (or at least research) it.


It's not a recent topic, and Andrei and I have discussed it in
newsgroups in the past, and unless his position has radically
changed, we more or less agree.

But I'm not sure what your question is. It's obvious that in
this case, garbage collection is necessary to protect against
and detect using dangling pointers. The idiom works because
with garbage collection, memory management is decoupled from
object lifetime; because even though the object has ceased to
exist, the memory behind it cannot be reused as long as anyone
has a pointer to it.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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