manual memory management

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/9/13 1:23 PM, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 21:14:56 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> If it holds the actual address you can't implement memory reclamation
>> and keep it safe.
>>
>> Andrei
>
>
> You mean because of circular references, or something else?
>
> And are you considering reference counting to be garbage collection like
> Walter does, or are you claiming refcounting won't solve this problem
> but GC will?

This is a bit of a crash course in GC and formal semantics in the form 
of a Q&A, which is rather inefficient.

The topic of GC and memory safety is well studied but unfortunately 
little information about it is available in book format. I suggest you 
start e.g. with http://llvm.org/pubs/2003-05-05-LCTES03-CodeSafety.pdf 
and the papers it refers to get a grip on the challenges and tradeoffs 
involved.

If anyone has better suggestions of reading materials, please chime in - 
I'd be very interested as well.


Thanks,

Andrei