RE: the advantages of garbage collection

Object garbage collection is important for a language that uses objects
... RPG doesn't.

True, but it's also because of granularity. Doing even the most simple stuff in a OO language creates new fine-graind objects, like integers. It's impossible to keep track of these allocated objects to deallocate them manually. And it would defeat the whole "OO experience" (most work would be to keep track of allocated objects and releasing them). In traditional languages like C the allocation of memory is much more explicit and coarse-grained.

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:50:08 -0500
From: david@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: the advantages of garbage collection

Steve Richter wrote:

regarding the future viability of RPG, I think a language has to have
garbage collection and built in object reference tracking ( which
enables the garbage collector to know when the object can be freed ).

I don't follow what garbage collection has to do with RPG.

Object garbage collection is important for a language that uses objects
... RPG doesn't.

Garbage collection is needed to free up memory used by unreferenced
objects ... since RPG doesn't have objects, there can be no unreferenced
objects ... thus, no need for garbage collection.

Anyways ... garbage collection isn't a function of the LANGUAGE ... it's
a function of the execution environment. JAVA the language doesn't
implement garbage collection ... the java Virtual Machine does.

david


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