Re: following up on speed

[Noel Welsh <address@hidden>]

--- Daniel Weinreb <DLWeinreb@attbi.com> wrote:
> Ken Anderson wrote:
> 
> >
> > "C programmers should now seriously consider using
> conservative 
> > garbage collection instead of malloc/free in
> programs they write." 
> 
> A big theme of the LL1 workshop was: why isn't
> industry listening to 
> academia? This
> strikes me as an excellent case to study, if anyone
> has the time and 
> inclination to do so.

A few reasons are easy:

- very few programmers know about conservative
collectors

- people have this problem with the timeliness of
resource harvesting.  Often listed as a pro of
reference counting schemes. I read that ref-counting
was seriously considered for .Net instead of garbage
collection!  (Not sure where, but following links from
Sam Gentile's web page (ask Google) might turn up the
discussion).

- for some uses (most often real time) GC is
considered bad (ignoring research on deterministic
GC).  Apparently a reason C++ doesn't include GC is so
it can be used in military systems that forbid GC
(again no reference).

Noel

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