Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Pros and Cons of Garbage Collection?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-would-you-prefer-to-allocate-YOUR-memory dept.

ers asks: "Most new programming languages are using garbage collection, rather than programmer-controlled memory management. The advantages are obvious: programmers no longer have to worry about forgetting to delete allocated memory, leading to far fewer memory leaks. The disadvantages are often glossed over by programming language designers - aside from the performance issues, predictable memory management can be used for controlling access to files and similar resources, creating safer thread locking code and even providing better error messages. Some programming languages, which usually predictable memory management, can also be made to behave like they are garbage collected - for example, Boost provides various C++ smart pointer classes. So, given the choice between garbage collection or manual memory management, which would you choose and why? When using a manual memory management language, when do you consider the performance and syntactic overhead of faked garbage collection to be worthwhile?"

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. I am strongly in favor of it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    After a few days, the garbage really starts to stinks and all sorts of animals come around.

  2. not true by doug · · Score: 2, Funny
    The myth that garbage collection = poor performance is just that, a myth, and most likely started by people who associate Java's performance issues with garbage collection.
    Sorry, but I've thought GC was slow since the 80s. Java had nothing to do with it. - doug
  3. Personally... by g-san · · Score: 3, Funny

    I prefer garbage collection. At most, I take the cans to the edge of the driveway and some guy in a noisy truck with a cool robotic arm just hauls it away. Yeah, there is a landfill somewhere that isn't good for the overall environment but I accept that tradeoff. I also don't throw old car batteries into the trash.

    Sure the hell beats me keeping the trash around, remembering where it is, and putting it in my truck and hauling it to the heaping landfill myself. I'm not here to manage trash, I'm here to get something done.

    Is this post about programming?