On 12 Aug 2007, at 08:00, JK Smith at Grid-Sky wrote:
1) Garbage collection. Anybody who's worked on apps with objects of
objects
of objects of objects will see the value in this. If CMEM is used,
can the
Boehm garbage collector be used?
I don't know if anyone has tried this, nor what the exact
requirements are for the Boehm garbage collector to work. An llvm
code generator backend will allow garbage collection to work (at
least if you don't mess around too much with assembler, I suppose),
but it's still quite far off.
Even a resurrection of the split-heap stuff
into something more generalized (mini-heaps) could help here.
Garbage collection means that the system relieves you from the memory
management mess, and that you cannot get things like double free
errors or using pointers are they have been freed. Split heaps on the
other hand are still manual memory management and therefore still
have similar downsides (and upsides) as other manual memory
management techniques.
So I don't really see the relation. Even though it may seem at first
sight that you do not have to bother with individual objects in case
of split heaps, in practice you do because you have to make sure that
no pointer to any of those objects can escape beyond where you free
the split heap.
2) Contract programming. We have to be able to show proof of
correctness in
code to prove the business value of FPC.
Tom Verhoeff and some of his students are doing some work on pre/
postconditions in a separate branch of FPC.
This will be a major theme for the
business side of software development in the future.
That remains to be seen.
3) A new concurrency model. Multi-core programming adds a layer of
complexity, plus the future of computing is all about where I can
buy or
steal a unit of computing power for my app.
This has been mentioned by many people before you, but it is quite
difficult to actually come up with such a model which is both easy/
intuitive and correct. Feel free to add your own proposal.
Note that extremely unlikely that things will happen just because you
say/think they are important. In most commercial project it depends
on whether you represent a lot of money which threatens to disappear
if your requirements are not met, because money is the primary value
there.
In non-commercial projects, contributors/maintainers are the primary
value, and thus actually submitting something rather than saying what
should be done in your opinion is most likely to have any positive
effect (there is no shortage of people with great ideas about what we
should spend our time on).
Jonas
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
