home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!wildcard.demon.co.uk
- From: Cyber Surfer <cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
- Date: Fri, 26 Jan 96 16:54:31 GMT
- Organization: The Wildcard Killer Butterfly Breeding Ground
- Message-ID: <822675271snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
- References: <rvillDL4v3n.I8r@netcom.com> <hbaker-2201961503250001@10.0.2.15> <4eae5s$66p@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
- Reply-To: cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk
- X-NNTP-Posting-Host: wildcard.demon.co.uk
- X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.30
- X-Mail2News-Path: wildcard.demon.co.uk
-
- In article <4eae5s$66p@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
- haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de "Bruno Haible" writes:
-
- > Just look at the technical strength of the argument that GC is not
- > "in the tradition of the C community"...
-
- Yeah, I love it. ;-)
-
- BTW, I've been asked to review a GC for C++, so I guess now is a
- good time to grab a few authoritive documents on the subject, like
- the docs at cs.utexas.edu:/pub/garbage/ or the files in Henry
- Baker's ftp space. I'll also have to find a Ghostscript viewer
- (preferably for NT), as I don't currently have a Postscript viewer,
- unless you count a laser printer. In this case, I don't.
-
- Mind you, I'm very happy with a mark/compact GC, and I found one
- in a computer science book, Fundamentals of Data Structures, by
- E Horowitz and S Sahni. While they're not anti-GC, they refer to
- Knuth and his belief that specialist languages such as Lisp and
- SNOBOL are not necessary, and that list and string processing can
- be done in any language. The languages that seem to have interested
- them tend to be PL/I, Pascal, and Fortran. Not at all like Lisp.
-
- The mark/compact algorithms they give are obviously not the best
- available today, but they are at least simple enough to implement
- easily. For programmers uncomfortable with relocating possible
- every pointer in a heap any time the GC runs, this could be
- important. I was suprised to find that when I coded a GC based on
- their algorithms in C, they worked first time. I've been using
- that code for the last 8 years without trouble, and with what I
- find to be acceptable performance.
-
- It was published in 1976, so its one of a number of books from
- around that time which I love. Sadly, many of the techniques in this
- particular book seem to have been forgotten. Is anyone still using
- coral rings, multilists and inverted multilists? Have these data
- structures become "obselete", like reference counting, cylinder-surface
- indexing, etc?
-
- Anyway, we can be sure that garbage collectors will be around for
- a while yet, as a fair number of popular (that's probably a relative
- issue - um, relative to VB or Perl? (-; ) language using a GC of
- some kind are still kicking around. I think that Henry Baker made
- a very good point about how people perceive delays in software.
-
- I'm currently seeing very long delays when I try to access most
- Internet sites in the US. :-( Still, that'll improve eventually.
- Then I may be able to grab some useful files, like some GC docs. ;-)
- Meanwhile, I should read the Java docs I have here, as I'll be
- using that soon. Doesn't Java use a GC...? I think it does!
- --
- <URL:http://www.demon.co.uk/community/index.html>
- <URL:http://www.enrapture.com/cybes/namaste.html>
- Po-Yeh-Pao-Lo-Mi | "You can never GC enough."
-