Re: Do you use a garbage collector?

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:41:27 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<a7fba2bd-7506-4189-80d0-80858b51b6d3@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>
On Apr 11, 2:16 pm, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

You seem to be misunderstanding the argument. There are
specific times when garbage collection might be chosen for
performance reasons, but they are fairly rare, and as you say,
you can also optimize the performance of manual schemes. The
main argument for garbage collection is greater programmer
efficiency.


I understood the argument, and I already said that I don't
feel I'm programming inefficiently. The style of safe modular
C++ programming tends to produce clean designs. In many cases
this is *not* at the cost of increased development time.


But how is this relevant to garbage collection. Safe, modular
programming will reduce development times in all cases.

In fact, if you can reuse your previously created modular
code, the development time may even decrease considerably.


Certainly. The large standard library is certainly a plus for
Java.

In my experience Java tends to lead to "reckless programming"
("why should I encapsulate when there's no need? the GC is
handling everything"), which often doesn't produce reusable
code, so in the long run it may even be counter-productive
with respect to development times.


What does encapsulation have to do with garbage collection?
That's what I don't understand. Encapsulation is encapsulation.
It's a must, period. If I were to judge uniquely by the code
I've actually had to work on, I'd have to say that encapsulation
was better in Java. In fact, I know that you can do even better
in C++, despite the way some people program in C++. And I know
that the one Java project I worked on was an exception (in
general, not just as a Java project) in that it was well
managed, and that encapsulation was an important issue up front,
and that some Java programmers tend to ignore it.

If there's a difference, I'd say that it is more related to the
size of the projects in each language. In small projects,
there's less organization, and more temptation to just ignore
the rules. And for reasons which have nothing to do with
garbage collection, Java doesn't scale well to large projects,
and tends to be used for small, short lived projects. But that
has nothing to do with garbage collection.

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