Re: Garbage Collection - The Trash Begins To Pile Up

From:

"Peter Dimov" <pdimov@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

8 Jan 2007 21:45:29 -0500

Message-ID:

<1168290718.069709.38290@i15g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

Thant Tessman wrote:

Peter Dimov wrote:

[...]

Many complex C++ programming projects do not need to garbage

collect at

all (and here I include shared_ptr as a poor man's collector). [...]

I know this is tangential to the point you were trying to make, but it
needs to be said. Your statement has cause and effect backwards. When
programming in C++, people tend to limit themselves to tasks and
techniques that don't rely on GC, because C++ doesn't have GC.

Not in my experience. The software I write needs to do X. I don't
artificially change its requirements to Y instead since X would require
garbage collection and Y would not.

When you do have real GC, your entire approach to the task of

programming changes.

If by real GC you mean one that also collects activation records to
support proper lambda, I agree. :-)

There are many many tasks (like threading!) that become *far* more

tractable.

Lock-free programming is an interesting case. It does require some form
of GC. I'm not yet sure whether it absolutely requires user-level GC,
though; it could be possible to isolate the GC and lock-freedom into
standard components, much like the STL containers have reduced the need
for user-level new/delete. Or to state that differently, I'm not
convinced that C++ without GC won't be able to adapt to these new
challenges.

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