On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 17:57:57 -0700, Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu>  
wrote:

> Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Yeah, imagine a world where you didn't have to wonder if the platform  
>> was
>> suddenly going to consume all the CPU time with automatic garbage
>> collection. ;-)

Of course, I meant this (mostly) tongue-in-cheek.

> In twenty years of using Smalltalk I've not yet suffered that particular  
> problem, except when debugging new GC mechansms as part of developing  
> the VM itself.

By "encounter", do you mean in a personal project? Because I thought there  
was a discussion about it going on right now on this list.

> On the other hand I've seen many memory leaks, memory-all-gone crashes,  
> virtual memory thrashing (in one case for three _days_) and buffer  
> overflows (ask windows users) and bad pointers because of a lack of  
> referential integrity. So, on balance I'll take the risk.

Yes, well, C certainly does suck.

And, yes, on balance, having to be responsible for memory is bad.

Sometimes, however, you need that control. Less and less, I presume, as GC  
technology improves.