Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 25, 2009 15:42 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) by shmget
Parent article: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Another argument against GC is that someone that is too lazy or too stupid to be bothered with what a pointer is, should stay away from the kernel.

That's a bad argument. The real benefit of GC isn't when the programmer doesn't know what a pointer is: it's when the data structures are elaborate enough that doing C-style owner-frees is difficult to impossible because it is not clear enough who the 'owner' is. I'm not sure if the kernel's data structures are that complex: I guess not. GCC's definitely are: a huge number of bugs and leaks vanished when the (handrolled) garbage collector went in in GCC 3.0. (Unfortunately locality of reference suffered compared to obstacks, damaging performance: so some of the subsets of the compiler's data structures which *do* have simple ownership patterns have been moving back into obstacks again.)