Re: More on garbage collection

From: Torben Ęgidius Mogensen (torbenm_at_app-4.diku.dk)
Date: 06/17/05 

Date: 17 Jun 2005 10:06:58 +0200

Joe Seigh <jseigh_01@xemaps.com> writes:

> One of the reasons they put JSR-166 into Java was so they could
> avoid GC in certain situations. A pretty telling argument against
> GC being the end all and be all.

Few people argue that GC is the end all and be all. However, a lot of
people argue that it is good enough to be the default, with options
for explicit handling when you need it. Even if there is no explicit
mechanism for manually deallocating memory in a GC-ed language
(allocation is manual regardless), you can allocate a large array and
manage allocation/deallocation inside that yourself, much like many C
programmers do because the standard malloc/free functions are too slow
for small objects.

> > If you can provide evidence that the the use of GC is making headway
> > outside its core community, please provide it.

If you define all users of GC to be the core community, of course we
can't. But the number of users of GC-ed languages has certainly
increased dramatically over the last couple of decades, not only due
to Java and C#, but also due to Perl, Python and other GC-ed scripting
languages.

        Torben

Quantcast