Re: Garbage Collection - The Trash Begins To Pile Up
Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
Greg Herlihy wrote:
In comparison, the typical memory problems of a C++ program are far
more serious: memory leaks, heap corruption, memory "stomping", invalid
output, "crashes" far removed from the site of the error - the variety
of potential C++ memory-management errors is practically infinite, and
uniformly disasterous.
The problems you listed are caused by programmers doing things they
should not be doing.
True, we should not be writing buggy code <g>.
The degree to which such problems manifest is
directly proportional to the degree to which programmers persists in
doing things that they should not be doing.
I can't disagree with that. More bugs in my code is usually
proportionately related to how many bugs I put in there.
I've spend more time in the past 6 months help people with GC
issues in languages that I don' t even know than I have spent on
related memory issues in my entire lifetime of C and C++. If I were to
add up the money wasted in salary for those people doing ..whatever it
is they are doing...it is simply huge.
GC certainly is no panacea. But I've spent 25 years programming in C and
C++, and the worst, nastiest, most time consuming bugs by far have been
related to memory management. Memory management issues also consume a
large part of program design time. These issues don't disappear with GC,
but they are 70-80% reduced with GC. That gets my work done faster with
fewer bugs.
Fortunately, the C++ committee can read the writing on the wall as well
as anyone: manual memory management is far too error-prone, produces
programs that are far too expensive to debug and maintain, and even
fails to deliver on the type safety guarantees of the language itself,
to be presented as a serious alternative to automated memory
management.
Failure of programmer or failure of language. I say failure of
programmer.
If there's a consistent problem area of programming, then that is a
fertile area for improving the language, since it is a pipe dream to try
and improve the programmer.
C++ without any form of automated memory management cannot be taken
seriously as a commercial-grade computer programming language today,
and even less so, tomorrow.
I might start believe this statement when GC proponents start writing
their GC's in a language other than C++.
The D programming language's GC is written 100% in D.
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