On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 11:24:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Walter wasn't arguing that there wasn't a place for manual
memory management.
He was arguing that you can't guarantee memory safety if you're
using manual
memory management - hence why malloc and free are @system.
@system code is not
memory safe like @safe code is, but it still very much has it's
place.
- Jonathan M Davis
You cannot guarantee memory safety with a GC either, depending on
the definition of "memory safety".
For example, you can still access deallocated memory by mistake,
run out of memory due to accumulating persistent pointers left
around by mistake, or free memory that was not supposed to be
freed by mistake. The GC implementation may fail due to bugs,
deallocating live memory or failing to deallocate inactive memory.
The only thing a GC can do for you, is free up the programmer
from the tedium of managing memory. It also allows constructs
that otherwise would be very difficult or impractical to
implement. The effect can be very positive, but there are no
guarantees of memory safety.
I also doubt that a "one size fits" all approach to garbage
collection will ever satisfy everyone. What's needed is the
ability to both manage memory manually and automatically (D
allows this which is good), but also allow for the automated
methods to be easily replaced (plug-ins come to mind), and if
possible allow sections of code to be managed by completely
different garbage collector implementations that are designed to
serve different purposes (this may or may not be practical to do).
--rt
