Slashdot Mirror
Xcode Update Gives Objective-C Garbage Collection
William Henderson writes "That's right, if you haven't read it for yourself yet, Objective-C '2.0' now supports garbage collection. I foresee a great, huge, gigantic debate about to ensue, and a lot of java-heads sparking 'I told you so'. Why not start it here on slashdot?"
AFAIK, garbage collection may be enabled or disabled as a compiler option. If you don't like it, then just disable it and carry on.
It isn't even a question of how good a programmer you are. It's a question of how good a programmer everybody on the team is. And "team" includes every library you use.
When memory is passed across the boundary from one developer to another, you need some kind of mechanism to track who is going to free that memory, and under what circumstances.
Garbage-collected languages make that contract fairly clear. (But not infinitely clear; there are still ways to accidentally pin objects in memory even in a GC language).
In C we got used to putting in comments saying, "I'm passing you back a static structure, so I'm not re-entrant" or "This thing is malloc'ed so free it when you're done" or "You have to pass in a reference to that object and I'll fill it in". As long as discipline is followed the program works brilliantly (no GC overhead) but if any developer anywhere on the project misreads any single one of those comments, you're completely and totally doomed.
There is still software to be cranked out by one guy who can keep the entire thing in his head, but software requirements for most things are too big for just one guy. Even the uberest of uber-hackers is limited by the dumbest guy on his team, especialyl when that dumbest guy (even if he's pretty damn smart) nulls out a memory location that wasn't finished yet.