manual memory management

[Rob T]

On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 07:23:57 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 07:22:51 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> Well, you CAN indeed, create a dumbed down language that is 
>> memory safe and don't require a GC.
>
>
> Yeah, that's 1 of my 2 points.
>
>
> The other one you still ignored: the GC doesn't bring much to 
> the table. (Re C# Java etc.)

There is a point being made here that is perfectly valid. There 
is a form of memory leak that a GC can never catch, such as when 
when memory is allocated and simply never deallocated by mistake 
due to a persistent "in use" pointer that should have been nulled 
but wasn't.

In addition, the GC itself may fail to deallocated freed memory 
or even free live memory by mistake. I've seen bugs described to 
that effect. There simply is no panacea to the memory leak 
problem. What a GC does do, is free the programmer from a ton of 
tedium, and even allow for constructs that would normally not be 
practical to implement, but it can never guarantee anything more 
than that.

--rt