[ILUG] introduction to programming

[Paul Jakma]

On Wed, 25 May 2005, Braun Brelin wrote:

> 1.  Garbage collection.  No more malloc()/free() issues.

You can do this in C. Refcounts + last decrementer frees is quite 
trivial.

You can do more advanced garbage collection if you want, even a 
psuedo-background-GC, if you registered memory references. Something 
like:

some_type *foo, *bar;

bar = memnew (sizeof foo);
foo = memref (&foo, bar); /* &foo holds reference to bar */

/* you could now 'memfree' bar.. and not have it free'd until
  * &foo is memunref'd or even whenever &foo no longer holds the value
  * of bar - in which case memunref would not be needed.
  */

Fully automatic scanning of heap and keeping track of references in 
stack (and hence not having to 'register' references) would be quite 
difficult in C I suspect (and platform specific)

memnew, memref and memunref are left as an exercise for the reader. 
Your system may already provide libraries which implement such things 
(eg glib has 'caches' i think).

If you're using malloc/free bare, you're doing something wrong :). 
I'd /almost/ argue that general code that fails to compile with 
malloc/free defined to something nonsensical is broken.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Superior ability breeds superior ambition.
 		-- Spock, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9