Re: Garbage Collection - The Trash Begins To Pile Up
Carlos Moreno wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
I would really be willing to bet one month of my salary that none
of any applications that any of my students (in that course) has
ever created has any memory leaks, or any memory-management problem
whatsoever; and we're talking about a lot of them (and as I said,
most of them are far below "elitesque" level). Actually, wait,
maybe some of them do have problems --- I'm now remembering that
a few of those students had had prior experience programming in
C; yep, I would bet another month of my salary that if there
are any programs with memory management issues, is one created
by some of those students with prior experience in C (well, or
in C++, which they most likely had learned from the likes of
Deitel & Deitel, which means that they had really learned C)
Student homework projects must be completable in a few hours, hence
they tend to be trivial.
Not the ones I'm talking about --- they go from 4-day projects to
full-course projects of 60+ intensive hours (plus the many hours
that they put on eevnings and weekends).
60 hours is a trivial amount of time to put into a software project.
Gads, it's only a week's work. Try one with 10 to 20 man years in it.
I'm talking about full database-enabled e-commerce sites, with
search capabilities, shopping cart and customer registration
facilities. Those can *not* be completed in a few hours; and
given more time, they could be turned into quasi-real-life-grade
projects, without even being physically possible to have any
memory leaks or memory management issues.
Most programmers very badly underestimate the amount of effort it takes
to take a project from demonstrating a concept and mostly working to
being a real product that can stand up in the real world to customer
expectations (i.e. that they're willing to pay money for and won't sue
you to get a refund or write horrible things about your company on the
internet). And I mean just the programming work.
Sourceforge is full of programs billed as just a couple of bricks short
of being a real product. The reality is they're a few truckloads short,
which is why they're abandoned.
None of my pure, elegantly designed programs has ever survived the
transition into a useful program with its virtue intact. Then again,
I've never shied away from a dirty trick <g>:
http://www.artima.com/cppsource/backyard.html
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