[ILUG] thoughts on malloc...

[Nick Murtagh]

On Tuesday 26 March 2002 19:23, Ronan wrote:
> On March 26, murtaghn at tcd.ie said:
> > is a big improvement but not ideal (probably as good as you'll get in C I
> > imagine).
>
> Well, no. There are better memory management systems for C than
> relying on malloc, such as garbage collection systems, and the time

That's a good point. But I was referring to the scope of the discussion.

> spent making sure you've tracked down every malloc'd block and free'd
> it can be otherwise spent improving your code. Personally, I like
> Perl's memory management, since I have no idea how it operates and
> IMHO that's pretty much the way memory management should be - unless,
> of course, you're coding for a highly restrictive environment, I
> guess.

I wouldn't agree there. The programmer needs to know the semantics of the
memory management system, otherwise it can get confusing. You need to 
know if objects are passed by reference or by value, when things get deleted
and so on. I don't know how perl works either - and I don't use it for that
and many other reasons :)

Java and C++ can look very similar at times, but because the memory management
is so different, you don't want to get them mixed up.

Also, if you don't have a rough idea what the MM is doing, you may 
inadvertantly write very memory intensive code, with lots of extra object 
creation and copying, for example. Always a danger in Java if you don't think 
about it.