About Garbages Collectors (not mentioned so far !) i think that they are nice but should not be a default management so rather optional. Once a GC handles the allocations it's very hard to use another alternative management on top because GCs tend to free manually allocated resources since they think they are not used anymore, i.e not used by a root memory block.
What's your favorite management technique: manual, ref counting or GC ?
Do you share my point of view on ?
Since I use C++ primarily, and it doesn't have a built-in garbage collector by default, I've just formed the habits of handling everything myself. Those habits and instincts carry over to other languages that do have GCs, but I will still manually free things as far as I'm allowed.
In a broader sense, I don't generally trust generic abstractions to do my work for me. If I'm not sure what's needed, I'll leave it to the automatic systems, but try to understand what's happening under the hood. If I know for certain what needs to happen, I'll do it myself, and let the automatic systems do mop-up work behind me in case I miss anything.
In the same way, I never let the compiler define constructors or destructors for me. Every (non-static) class I write has, in the least, explicitly empty constructors. Knowing how my coding adventures usually go, the one time I trust the compiler to define the destructor, it'd hit an edge-case and bork. So, I don't leave much room for that kind of madness.
Ironically, the above is probably in part my Python background talking: "explicit is better than implicit".
Now, with that said, one should know all the automatic tools their language offers, and how to use (and not to use) them. Doing things manually is not an excuse for ignorance. All the above does not preclude me from using such bits of magic as std::unique_ptr, which handles its own deallocation via a GC. I simply make an informed decision on whether to do it myself, or to use a tool that specifically matches the use case.
By the way, in terms of ref counting, I am reminded of a classic AI Koan...
One day a student came to Moon and said: “I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons.”
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
“One day a student came to Moon and said: ‘I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
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About Garbages Collectors (not mentioned so far !) i think that they are nice but should not be a default management so rather optional. Once a GC handles the allocations it's very hard to use another alternative management on top because GCs tend to free manually allocated resources since they think they are not used anymore, i.e not used by a root memory block.
What's your favorite management technique: manual, ref counting or GC ?
Do you share my point of view on ?
Since I use C++ primarily, and it doesn't have a built-in garbage collector by default, I've just formed the habits of handling everything myself. Those habits and instincts carry over to other languages that do have GCs, but I will still manually free things as far as I'm allowed.
In a broader sense, I don't generally trust generic abstractions to do my work for me. If I'm not sure what's needed, I'll leave it to the automatic systems, but try to understand what's happening under the hood. If I know for certain what needs to happen, I'll do it myself, and let the automatic systems do mop-up work behind me in case I miss anything.
In the same way, I never let the compiler define constructors or destructors for me. Every (non-static) class I write has, in the least, explicitly empty constructors. Knowing how my coding adventures usually go, the one time I trust the compiler to define the destructor, it'd hit an edge-case and bork. So, I don't leave much room for that kind of madness.
Ironically, the above is probably in part my Python background talking: "explicit is better than implicit".
Now, with that said, one should know all the automatic tools their language offers, and how to use (and not to use) them. Doing things manually is not an excuse for ignorance. All the above does not preclude me from using such bits of magic as
std::unique_ptr, which handles its own deallocation via a GC. I simply make an informed decision on whether to do it myself, or to use a tool that specifically matches the use case.By the way, in terms of ref counting, I am reminded of a classic AI Koan...