Detecting cycles is the usual argument for garbage collection, but not the only one. For example, it is useful for implementing persistent data structures, where the memory dependencies quickly get very complicated. These data structures are common (often required) in functional languages, which is one reason those languages are garbage collected as a rule. In some cases it is even possible for garbage collection to be faster than explicit allocation and deallocation, as the allocation strategy can be extremely simple (just bump a pointer). I agree that RAII is an excellent solution to at least 90% of memory management, but I think there is enough reason to investigate opt-in garbage collection approaches for C++. Patrick On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Frank Mori Hess <frank.hess@nist.gov>wrote:
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On Monday 20 April 2009, Simonson, Lucanus J wrote:
be too much of a burden, and if I wanted to be lazy I could use shared pointers to do the reference counting instead of using a GC library with equal extra effort. I don't want to be lazy, and I don't want to debug
A garbage collector does have an advantage over shared_ptr reference counting, in that it can automatically detect cycles. Although, it does seem like it should be possible to detect shared_ptr cycles by keeping track of the memory regions owned by shared_ptrs and comparing them with the addresses of shared_ptr objects. Then you could build up a graph which could be checked for cycles and connectedness. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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