Comment by spapas82
3 years ago
20 years ago in the programming languages lesson at the university we started learning about OOP using Java and Ada as examples. When the professor started describing Java, a fellow student interrupted him to inform the class that "Java has garbage collection" (and boast of his special knowledge).
After that incident his nickname was "the garbage collector"!
Coincidentally, Ada optionally supports garbage collection in its specifications but it's up to the runtime to implement it.
And since no implementation has ever supported it, it has been deprecated in ISO Ada 95 and further removed from it on ISO Ada 2012.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Pragmas/Contro...
There was this project though.
https://github.com/Roldak/AGC
The best part is that it's faster than manual management. People will tell you they need do to malloc and free manually for performance, but when you actually run the numbers GC wins for a majority of use cases.
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> and further removed from it on ISO Ada 2012.
and in that precise moment Ada proved it had garbage collection all along
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There was an Ada implementation on the Lisp Machine, that might have been using GC.
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Which means no library can depend on it, pushing memory management responsibilities into calling code.
Ah, same as C++ it sounds like.
Plot Twist:
20 years later, he wrote "The Garbage Collection Handbook" and is the leading authority on garbage collection.
Stop-the-world indeed