I maintain you are making assumptions that reach well beyond what we know about OUR universe, let alone gods plane.
That's what we all do. My assumptions are based on logic, however. Logic is universal and can not be different in other universes.
For instance, string theory predicts a "greater" universe of M-Branes. These are, by necessity of the observations in our universe, eternal having neither a creation nor an end point yet by your definition they have time because periodically they collide which is what created the big bang.
But the m-branes are not omnipotent and omniscient, i.e. infinite in capabilities and in knowledge. They exist within a structure which is larger than them, a structure that encloses them.
I dispute your contention that change mandates an end and therefore a beginning. Time can also be defined in terms of a reference beginning point which in an endless universe does not exist ergo no time (something of a tautology I know but still a valid definition of time)
No, you did not understand. Change does not mandate an end and a beginning. Change dictates the existence of a space-time that is greater than God. Therefore God is not omnipotent and omniscient, because the god-universe is greater than the God. But this fact leads to the conclusion that God could not have created the god-universe, so either the god-universe is eternal or someone else created it.
Actually, it is entropy itself that causes the random destruction.
Indeed. But if entropy exists in this universe, is it controlled by God? if God does not control it, then God is not omnipotent and omniscient...if God controls the entropy, then he has intentions, which can not be an attribute of an infinite entity. Intentions come from feelings, feelings come from instincts, instincts are created by nature. God can't have all these, because God is omnipotent and omniscient. Unless God is not.
What if there was no trend? What if an atom stayed in place unless acted upon by a consciousness? There is actually nothing that precludes this scenario and that easily allows for creation without mandating terminals for the universe
And what moves the atoms of the consciousness? obviously, the consciousness itself is composed of something, otherwise it would not exist.
Actually, some physicist think that OUR universe was only caused by the presence of our conscious ability to interpret it.
That's an urban myth created by the misinterpretation of the Schrodiger's Cat experiment and the false interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
The wave function collapses as soon as it comes in contact not with a conscious observer, but with another particle. This collapse is necessary for the universe to exist, and it has nothing to do with the presence of a conscious observer.
Due to the separation of cause and effect, since we were GOING to be here the quantum supposition in our area collapsed creating the universe within our view (defined by about 15 billion light years.) Outside this area the universe is a standing wave and has not condensed at all. All this is very esoteric and I won't pretend to understand it much at all but all these theories are based on observations of OUR universe.
Nope, there's the false interpretation again. A particle is a wave until it needs to interact with another particle. The twin slit experiment takes place with or without our presence. The photon particles maintain their wave properties in front of our eyes. They don't collapse even if we are there. They only collapse when we try to measure them using another photon.
We have already proven that temporal infinity does not preclude change outside of our universe.
Indeed, but the problem here is how do we fit an omnipotent and omniscient god in the picture. It seems that, fr
The system runs at ring 0, the local applications at ring 1, the intranet applications at ring 2, the internet applications at ring 3. Thus no malware can do anything, unless there is a bug in the software interfaces between the rings.
Those big movies of yesteryear (the first Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek etc) were all products of inspiration. People put their heart in them, and the result was tremendous.
Nowadays, it's all about profit. And the outcome is bad, because it lacks any sort of love put into it.
I haven't seen a really good film for a long time now. Even Lord Of The Rings was very mediocre (especially since I've read the books before seeing the movies).
I fear that the next Star Trek movie will be just as bad as Indy 4 will be...
The universe may be infinitely complex, but that does not mean it can not be described with a single mathematical formula. PI is infinite, but it can represented by the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
Perhaps the universe's formula is something like a fractal, with infinite complexity and depth.
My argument is not based on causality, it is based on the concept of change: any system that can change states has the concept of 'before' and 'after', and therefore time. If that system contains matter, it also has the concept of space.
A note on causality: experiencing the effect before experiencing the cause does not mean the effect happened before the cause, nor does it mean that the effect is disconnected from the cause.
For the god-universe, I am not saying that it has matter as we know it or that the laws of thermodynamics are in use in the god-universe. I am saying that the god-universe has a space-time, implied by the concept of creation. The existence of space-time in the god-universe invalidates the omnipotent and omniscient properties of god.
The existence of space-time in the god-universe also implies the existence of entropy working in the same manner as the entropy of our universe, albeit with a different mechanism and materials. If entropy does not exist in a universe, then nothing could be created in it: any creation would be randomly destroyed.
Finally, the concept of creation implies the existence of some form of energy converted into our universe.
The proposition that time may not exist anyway is not valid, as long as we have changes in a system. The very existence of change implies a state before and a different state after an event, which is the definition of time.
As for free will, I will reply with a question: does Indiana Jones have free will when he is faced with the dilemma to open the Ark of the Covenant or not? he thinks he has, but we know he does not. And we know he is going to open it. Same thing goes with God: we think we have free will, but the script is already written, and God knows it.
God does not need to observe the result, because he has created it, so the argument is moot.
The Bible's reference to hell is a metaphore, the Pope's reference to hell was not a metaphore. Actually, the Pope explained the Bible's reference: hell is not a physical place, it's a place out of this universe, a logical existence of eternal torture.
Of course that's all bullshit, because no sane god would throw us in eternal torture just because we have sinned in such an infinitely small period of time that is our lives.
To create something means a change of state. The universe goes from state A to state B.
Since there is a flow (A -> B), there is time.
Therefore, if God created something, there is a timespace that encloses God.
You are asking why the place God interacts from must have had a beginning...a valid question. Let's name this place the God-universe. There are two possible answers:
1) the God-universe is eternal. 2) the God-universe is not eternal.
Let's examine case 1.
If the God-universe is eternal, and since it contains the same concept of time and space as our universe (because of the concept of creation, see above), then the God-universe's entropy would be infinite, which would not allow anything to be created. Therefore, either the creation did not happen, or the God-universe is not eternal. Since we exist, it seems the God-universe is not eternal.
So, we have conclusively proven that it's not possible for a universe that can change states to be eternal. Therefore, someone must have created the God-universe.
This leads to infinite recursion, and therefore the initial proposition must be wrong, i.e. that someone created this universe.
The concept of creation also leads to another issue: if God is infinite in all directions, can he create something so as that what exists after the creation is greater than what existed before creation?
In mathematics, it's not possible to add something to infinite, and therefore one can not make comparisons with infinite numbers. The formula 'infinite + 1 > infinite' is not a valid mathematical formula.
Therefore, an infinite God can not create anything, because if he did, he would not be infinite.
So either God does not exist, or there was no creation. Since we exist, the only logical conclusion is that God does not exist, at least as we think God is (an omnipotent and omniscient being).
Finally, the concept of omniscient God comes in direct contradiction with the concept of free will.
It wasn't a metaphore. The Pope meant that Hell is not a specific place in the Cosmos, it is a 'logical' place without physical existence where the torture takes place.
The very concept of 'creation' is not compatible with the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God. The concept of 'creation' implies the existence of a time-space continuum, because creating something means to alter the state of something. But the existence of a time-space continuum that God exists in comes in direct contradiction with the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God: if there is a structure larger than God that God lives in, then God is not infinite. It also raises the question of how this God-universe was created.
Even if God and this time-space continuum was one and the same, the concept of creation means that the two dimensions of this universe (space and time - space is one dimension with 3 components) also exist in the God-universe. Which means that either the God-universe had a start or it existed for ever. If the God-universe existed for ever, why this universe can not exist for ever? if, on the other hand, the God-universe had a start, then who created it? both outcomes are problematic.
Christians will now tell me that I don't understand God, and I can't speak for things I don't understand. Ok, I accept that, but I will ask them the same question: how do they understand that I don't understand God? by what criteria they can identify that my conclusions are wrong? what do they compare them against?
1. Install O/S and applications in partition A, your data in partition B. 2. Take snapshot of partition A. 3. when you suspect a rootkit, restore partition A from snapshot.
Of course that's not a real solution, but a way to bypass the problem. A real solution would be for Windows to be secure, but that will never happen, as long as Microsoft does not make the O/S virtual per user.
Sorry, I meant 'write'. But the question is still valid. If I am going to write a cross platform app, why choose a toolkit with so many platform-specific -isms, like win32-isms (WM_ messages, HWND, WndProc etc) and not choose one that makes more sense, like GTK#?
You can use handles in Winforms, they just do not map to an actual HWND on non-Win32 systems, but you can definitely use them, and you can even override WndProc methods on derived classes from Control and process a pile of WM_ messages that Mono's Winforms actually builds on.
Why WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages are still there? I understand Microsoft built a software monopoly by mixing Window System management and a GUI toolkit together (and transferring it to.NET ensures that monopoly), but isn't.NET supposed to be one of the most advanced toolkits out there? Having to rely on WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages seems a very bad design for me (I've been developing MFC apps for a decade now and I know of the numerous problems that might come up), and unfortunately Mono WinForms copied that in order to be compatible with.NET.
Initially I thought 'wow, a contender to Qt/Java for building cross-platform apps', but after reading the blog and being an supporter of anything but Win32 (the ugliest API ever written), I will think twice before using Mono or.NET for cross platform development.
I started on Qt4, which uses MVC extensively. I've never had to do that so I can't comment.
I don't think there is any difference with Qt4 though. The memory management model of Qt4 is the same as the Qt3, so i don't see any difference. Problems like sharing data still remain.
Of course, but that still gives you almost no information about overall performance. You don't know what the tradeoff is.
You may not know overall performance, but you certain know that performance is not the same as in the case that there is no locking.
With a garbage collector you lose the predictability. Last thing I want is the collector running at random times when my application is time-sensitive.
That's why GC must be optional in C++.
Right now in about 10kloc I have a grand total of 7 delete statements. All my other memory is handled by Qt. Yes that's a small app (I'm the sole dev) but for stuff like that I really have no need for a GC.
Assuming you have a GUI application, how do you handle the data models? I am doing a small gui application too (27 Kloc so far), and I have separated by code into model, view and controller namespaces, and the model is one big tree of objects. But they are not QObjects, memory management is handled by boost::shared_ptr, because the objects of the tree are shared with other components of the system. For example, the user can start the execution of a scenario (my app is a sort of simulation) while being able to remove the scenario from the database, and therefore the execution module will hold the last pointer of the removed scenario and not the object model.
So how do you handle cases like that?
Exactly the sort of thing that Qt will handle for you, and as an application developer I never have to worry about.
Qt's memory management is not adequate; an application requires many hacks and tricks even in the presence of Qt. Suppose you have a model-view-controller architecture, i.e. a big data model and a big UI hierarchy that reflects the data model. With Qt 3 (I have no knowledge of Qt 4), you have to write adaptor classes that monitor the data model and affect the UI and vice versa, because Qt 3 does not support the MVC pattern.
So how should the adaptor lifetime classes be managed? The data model does not inherit QObject, it uses reference counting, because the objects of the data model are referenced from multiple sites. But the adaptor classes need to live as long as the UI lives, and therefore they can be QObjects. When the UI objects are deleted, the adaptors are deleted as well, and therefore the data model must contain weak ptrs to them.
This is quite complicated and tricky to use, and it contains many gotchas. With garbage collection, there would not be such issues.
Assuming your calculation is correct on overhead, you're still missing the second part of the calculation. What's the overhead of the garbage collector? Both in terms of memory, CPU usage, and unpredictability. I highly doubt it will be less than the few bytes you're using to keep track of your objects.
There is no great overhead from using a gc, even if the gc is a conservative one ala Boehm's. A compacting GC is much better, of course. Memory allocation with gc is faster than manual memory management (I've measure this while trying to use the Boehm's gc; Java's memory management runs circles around c++'s memory management). You can see it here.
Until you make a huge leap to the conclusion where it all falls apart. System responsiveness is a massively complex issue, and you can't even begin to guess the tradeoff between reference counting and garbage collection without some real testing.
When the bus or the shared cache is locked, there are stalls in all the parts of the system that wish to access those resources, by the very definition of the operation: locking means some part of the system will have to wait.
You can't do that with templates, unfortunately. And it's tedious and error prone to having to declare all data structures of a program explicitly. Additionally, lots of other libraries, including the STL, will not use such a mechanism, and therefore it's gonna be a waste of time. Finally, stack frames are data structures themselves but pointers into them can't be declared to the collector manually.
Re:A note on signals and slots
on
In-Depth With Qt 4.4
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, sorry, I meant the MOC.
I do not want to run the MOC myself, neither would I want to have to setup a build action for each file. I just want to press F5 and see my app compile. Anything else detracts from the development process.
I can't buy Qt4, my boss will not buy it.
I did signals/slots programmatically, and it's great. I studied the boilerplate code the MOC creates and simply copied it into templates. Now I don't have to use any special tools.
Another benefit from this is that I can use any function as a slot, even stand-alone functions themselves. I don't have to declare slots any more!!!
I understand that for Trolltech, the signals and slots mechanism is used as a kind of vendor lock in, but for me it's a nuisance, at best.
There is a great reason for using garbage collection: you can make complex object relationships that are much less painful to do than without garbage collection.
A real example is a widget tree: a widget contains pointers to children and a pointer to the parent.
In C++ without garbage collection, pointers to children must be shared pointers and the pointer to the parent must be a weak pointer, otherwise a cycle will be created. This means that you get extra data per widget: a) 4 bytes for the reference count of each object, b) a list container of weak pointers (which may be from 12 to 48 bytes, depending on implementation). This overhead is not significant if your widgets are not many, but it becomes significant when you have memory constraints (e.g. on a hand-held device) or when you have a lot of objects organized in trees. A bigger memory footprint means greater cache misses, which in turn means a slower application.
In C++ with garbage collection, none of the above would be necessary. Furthermore, there would not be any danger of introducing a cycle via inheritance (which is a very difficult bug to trace).
Shared pointers also have a significant overhead in multithreaded environments. In order to handle the reference counting from multiple threads, atomic increment and decrement instructions need to be used, and these instructions lock some aspect of the system (the bus, the cache, etc) and so the system becomes less responsive.
Boost's lambda functions are very limited in functionality. GUI apps require whole bunch of functionality to be written as callbacks, something not possible with boost's lambdas.
Actually, garbage collection will de-bloat C++ significantly. References and rvalue references are there due to lack of garbage collection.
One of the reasons C is easy is because it only contains one type of indirection, the pointer. And that's all that is needed from a language that has pointers (i.e. C, C++, ADA etc).
C++ contains 3 types of indirection: pointers, references, and rvalue references (not yet in the standard, but it's coming next year). All of them are actually pointers.
And let's not forget all the special pointer classes (shared_ptr, weak_ptr etc).
All these are not necessary when there is garbage collection.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what we all do. My assumptions are based on logic, however. Logic is universal and can not be different in other universes.
But the m-branes are not omnipotent and omniscient, i.e. infinite in capabilities and in knowledge. They exist within a structure which is larger than them, a structure that encloses them.
No, you did not understand. Change does not mandate an end and a beginning. Change dictates the existence of a space-time that is greater than God. Therefore God is not omnipotent and omniscient, because the god-universe is greater than the God. But this fact leads to the conclusion that God could not have created the god-universe, so either the god-universe is eternal or someone else created it.
Indeed. But if entropy exists in this universe, is it controlled by God? if God does not control it, then God is not omnipotent and omniscient...if God controls the entropy, then he has intentions, which can not be an attribute of an infinite entity. Intentions come from feelings, feelings come from instincts, instincts are created by nature. God can't have all these, because God is omnipotent and omniscient. Unless God is not.
And what moves the atoms of the consciousness? obviously, the consciousness itself is composed of something, otherwise it would not exist.
That's an urban myth created by the misinterpretation of the Schrodiger's Cat experiment and the false interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The wave function collapses as soon as it comes in contact not with a conscious observer, but with another particle. This collapse is necessary for the universe to exist, and it has nothing to do with the presence of a conscious observer.
Nope, there's the false interpretation again. A particle is a wave until it needs to interact with another particle. The twin slit experiment takes place with or without our presence. The photon particles maintain their wave properties in front of our eyes. They don't collapse even if we are there. They only collapse when we try to measure them using another photon.
Indeed, but the problem here is how do we fit an omnipotent and omniscient god in the picture. It seems that, fr
The system runs at ring 0, the local applications at ring 1, the intranet applications at ring 2, the internet applications at ring 3. Thus no malware can do anything, unless there is a bug in the software interfaces between the rings.
Those big movies of yesteryear (the first Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek etc) were all products of inspiration. People put their heart in them, and the result was tremendous.
Nowadays, it's all about profit. And the outcome is bad, because it lacks any sort of love put into it.
I haven't seen a really good film for a long time now. Even Lord Of The Rings was very mediocre (especially since I've read the books before seeing the movies).
I fear that the next Star Trek movie will be just as bad as Indy 4 will be...
The universe may be infinitely complex, but that does not mean it can not be described with a single mathematical formula. PI is infinite, but it can represented by the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
Perhaps the universe's formula is something like a fractal, with infinite complexity and depth.
My argument is not based on causality, it is based on the concept of change: any system that can change states has the concept of 'before' and 'after', and therefore time. If that system contains matter, it also has the concept of space.
A note on causality: experiencing the effect before experiencing the cause does not mean the effect happened before the cause, nor does it mean that the effect is disconnected from the cause.
For the god-universe, I am not saying that it has matter as we know it or that the laws of thermodynamics are in use in the god-universe. I am saying that the god-universe has a space-time, implied by the concept of creation. The existence of space-time in the god-universe invalidates the omnipotent and omniscient properties of god.
The existence of space-time in the god-universe also implies the existence of entropy working in the same manner as the entropy of our universe, albeit with a different mechanism and materials. If entropy does not exist in a universe, then nothing could be created in it: any creation would be randomly destroyed.
Finally, the concept of creation implies the existence of some form of energy converted into our universe.
The proposition that time may not exist anyway is not valid, as long as we have changes in a system. The very existence of change implies a state before and a different state after an event, which is the definition of time.
As for free will, I will reply with a question: does Indiana Jones have free will when he is faced with the dilemma to open the Ark of the Covenant or not? he thinks he has, but we know he does not. And we know he is going to open it. Same thing goes with God: we think we have free will, but the script is already written, and God knows it.
God does not need to observe the result, because he has created it, so the argument is moot.
The Bible's reference to hell is a metaphore, the Pope's reference to hell was not a metaphore. Actually, the Pope explained the Bible's reference: hell is not a physical place, it's a place out of this universe, a logical existence of eternal torture.
Of course that's all bullshit, because no sane god would throw us in eternal torture just because we have sinned in such an infinitely small period of time that is our lives.
You did not understand my words.
To create something means a change of state. The universe goes from state A to state B.
Since there is a flow (A -> B), there is time.
Therefore, if God created something, there is a timespace that encloses God.
You are asking why the place God interacts from must have had a beginning...a valid question. Let's name this place the God-universe. There are two possible answers:
1) the God-universe is eternal.
2) the God-universe is not eternal.
Let's examine case 1.
If the God-universe is eternal, and since it contains the same concept of time and space as our universe (because of the concept of creation, see above), then the God-universe's entropy would be infinite, which would not allow anything to be created. Therefore, either the creation did not happen, or the God-universe is not eternal. Since we exist, it seems the God-universe is not eternal.
So, we have conclusively proven that it's not possible for a universe that can change states to be eternal. Therefore, someone must have created the God-universe.
This leads to infinite recursion, and therefore the initial proposition must be wrong, i.e. that someone created this universe.
The concept of creation also leads to another issue: if God is infinite in all directions, can he create something so as that what exists after the creation is greater than what existed before creation?
In mathematics, it's not possible to add something to infinite, and therefore one can not make comparisons with infinite numbers. The formula 'infinite + 1 > infinite' is not a valid mathematical formula.
Therefore, an infinite God can not create anything, because if he did, he would not be infinite.
So either God does not exist, or there was no creation. Since we exist, the only logical conclusion is that God does not exist, at least as we think God is (an omnipotent and omniscient being).
Finally, the concept of omniscient God comes in direct contradiction with the concept of free will.
It wasn't a metaphore. The Pope meant that Hell is not a specific place in the Cosmos, it is a 'logical' place without physical existence where the torture takes place.
The very concept of 'creation' is not compatible with the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God. The concept of 'creation' implies the existence of a time-space continuum, because creating something means to alter the state of something. But the existence of a time-space continuum that God exists in comes in direct contradiction with the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God: if there is a structure larger than God that God lives in, then God is not infinite. It also raises the question of how this God-universe was created.
Even if God and this time-space continuum was one and the same, the concept of creation means that the two dimensions of this universe (space and time - space is one dimension with 3 components) also exist in the God-universe. Which means that either the God-universe had a start or it existed for ever. If the God-universe existed for ever, why this universe can not exist for ever? if, on the other hand, the God-universe had a start, then who created it? both outcomes are problematic.
Christians will now tell me that I don't understand God, and I can't speak for things I don't understand. Ok, I accept that, but I will ask them the same question: how do they understand that I don't understand God? by what criteria they can identify that my conclusions are wrong? what do they compare them against?
Don't be silly...the Pope does not have more guns than G.W. Bush...
1. Install O/S and applications in partition A, your data in partition B.
2. Take snapshot of partition A.
3. when you suspect a rootkit, restore partition A from snapshot.
Of course that's not a real solution, but a way to bypass the problem. A real solution would be for Windows to be secure, but that will never happen, as long as Microsoft does not make the O/S virtual per user.
Sorry, I meant 'write'. But the question is still valid. If I am going to write a cross platform app, why choose a toolkit with so many platform-specific -isms, like win32-isms (WM_ messages, HWND, WndProc etc) and not choose one that makes more sense, like GTK#?
But if I want my app to be cross platform, why not right it in GTK# from the beginning?
From the blog:
Why WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages are still there? I understand Microsoft built a software monopoly by mixing Window System management and a GUI toolkit together (and transferring it to .NET ensures that monopoly), but isn't .NET supposed to be one of the most advanced toolkits out there? Having to rely on WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages seems a very bad design for me (I've been developing MFC apps for a decade now and I know of the numerous problems that might come up), and unfortunately Mono WinForms copied that in order to be compatible with .NET.
Initially I thought 'wow, a contender to Qt/Java for building cross-platform apps', but after reading the blog and being an supporter of anything but Win32 (the ugliest API ever written), I will think twice before using Mono or .NET for cross platform development.
Very impressive! Star Trek-like AI...
Are you sure?
But Qt's containers are a superset of the STL containers.
And you can't beat QString...std::string and std::wstring are useless classes, unsuitable for anything but trivial cases.
Qt's memory management is not adequate; an application requires many hacks and tricks even in the presence of Qt. Suppose you have a model-view-controller architecture, i.e. a big data model and a big UI hierarchy that reflects the data model. With Qt 3 (I have no knowledge of Qt 4), you have to write adaptor classes that monitor the data model and affect the UI and vice versa, because Qt 3 does not support the MVC pattern.
So how should the adaptor lifetime classes be managed? The data model does not inherit QObject, it uses reference counting, because the objects of the data model are referenced from multiple sites. But the adaptor classes need to live as long as the UI lives, and therefore they can be QObjects. When the UI objects are deleted, the adaptors are deleted as well, and therefore the data model must contain weak ptrs to them.
This is quite complicated and tricky to use, and it contains many gotchas. With garbage collection, there would not be such issues.
There is no great overhead from using a gc, even if the gc is a conservative one ala Boehm's. A compacting GC is much better, of course. Memory allocation with gc is faster than manual memory management (I've measure this while trying to use the Boehm's gc; Java's memory management runs circles around c++'s memory management). You can see it here. When the bus or the shared cache is locked, there are stalls in all the parts of the system that wish to access those resources, by the very definition of the operation: locking means some part of the system will have to wait.No, "billion" means 10^9 in almost every place on earth, expect in some places in Britain.
Unless the world for you it's the USA and the UK...
You can't do that with templates, unfortunately. And it's tedious and error prone to having to declare all data structures of a program explicitly. Additionally, lots of other libraries, including the STL, will not use such a mechanism, and therefore it's gonna be a waste of time. Finally, stack frames are data structures themselves but pointers into them can't be declared to the collector manually.
Yeah, sorry, I meant the MOC.
I do not want to run the MOC myself, neither would I want to have to setup a build action for each file. I just want to press F5 and see my app compile. Anything else detracts from the development process.
I can't buy Qt4, my boss will not buy it.
I did signals/slots programmatically, and it's great. I studied the boilerplate code the MOC creates and simply copied it into templates. Now I don't have to use any special tools.
Another benefit from this is that I can use any function as a slot, even stand-alone functions themselves. I don't have to declare slots any more!!!
I understand that for Trolltech, the signals and slots mechanism is used as a kind of vendor lock in, but for me it's a nuisance, at best.
There is a great reason for using garbage collection: you can make complex object relationships that are much less painful to do than without garbage collection.
A real example is a widget tree: a widget contains pointers to children and a pointer to the parent.
In C++ without garbage collection, pointers to children must be shared pointers and the pointer to the parent must be a weak pointer, otherwise a cycle will be created. This means that you get extra data per widget: a) 4 bytes for the reference count of each object, b) a list container of weak pointers (which may be from 12 to 48 bytes, depending on implementation). This overhead is not significant if your widgets are not many, but it becomes significant when you have memory constraints (e.g. on a hand-held device) or when you have a lot of objects organized in trees. A bigger memory footprint means greater cache misses, which in turn means a slower application.
In C++ with garbage collection, none of the above would be necessary. Furthermore, there would not be any danger of introducing a cycle via inheritance (which is a very difficult bug to trace).
Shared pointers also have a significant overhead in multithreaded environments. In order to handle the reference counting from multiple threads, atomic increment and decrement instructions need to be used, and these instructions lock some aspect of the system (the bus, the cache, etc) and so the system becomes less responsive.
Boost's lambda functions are very limited in functionality. GUI apps require whole bunch of functionality to be written as callbacks, something not possible with boost's lambdas.
Actually, garbage collection will de-bloat C++ significantly. References and rvalue references are there due to lack of garbage collection.
One of the reasons C is easy is because it only contains one type of indirection, the pointer. And that's all that is needed from a language that has pointers (i.e. C, C++, ADA etc).
C++ contains 3 types of indirection: pointers, references, and rvalue references (not yet in the standard, but it's coming next year). All of them are actually pointers.
And let's not forget all the special pointer classes (shared_ptr, weak_ptr etc).
All these are not necessary when there is garbage collection.
The Qt's container APIs are richer than the STL.