Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Ed Prochak
Date : Fri Jul 22 2005 11:00 am

I for one thought that GC was a stupid idea. It makes the OO
programmers lazy.

The cleanup merely requires some protocols that identify when the
object has outlived its usefullness. In embedded environments you
usually know fairly precisely when you are done with something and can
invoke its cleanup (destructor) methods. I don't see much reason why
this isn't possible to know in other cases.

The "snail trail" is in the objects already. when I'm done with an
object I invoke its cleanup (destructor) method which in turn invokes
the cleanup methods for each child object that it allocated
(constructed), which in turn invokes . . . methods down to the
elemental/terminal objects.

When OO was first proposed, I sincerely believed it would help resolve
some of the memory leak problems our C applications had at the time.
Instead, OO applications (especially of the C++ flavor) seem to have
even greater waste and abuse of memory. So much was promised, and so
little delivered.

Ed

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