From: MikkelFJ <mikkelfj-anti-spam@...>
Date: 2002-08-01T02:19:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Ocaml - my two favorite languages


"Ned Konz" <ned@bike-nomad.com> wrote in message
news:200207310916.58062@ned.bike-nomad.com...

> Of course, there's no reason why you couldn't use GC with C++; there
> are some good libraries for this.
>
> My feeling is that using C++ with GC and the STL (and C++ strings)
> would result in considerably fewer C style bugs (stray pointers,
> buffer overflows, multiple frees, etc.) and faster development.

Actually STL greatly reduces the need for GC thanks to its built in memory
management. Still GC offers a lot of extra opportunities for cleaner designs
and safer development.
Although there are GC for C++, I don't consider them a serious option for
normal development. For special purposes such as handling message buffers
for SOAP interfaces, GC has been successfully used.

There are also C-like languages that deals with some of these issues - I
believe one interesting variant is called Vault (as I recall). It's more
inference based deallocation. A new langauge with C-level control and better
memory management would be great.

Even with GC in C++, there are efficient languages with native GC, so why
not use them?


Mikkel