3 ms·

"...make_shared" Sorry, I'm going to be a bit harsh now. There is a host of distinctive differences between garbage collection and reference counting. Yes, bo

by fsloth 9y ago

"...make_shared" Sorry, I'm going to be a bit harsh now. There is a host of distinctive differences between garbage collection and reference counting. Yes, both are memory handling strategies. That's where the similarities end. "Just slap it in a shared pointer" is never a good advice without knowledge what 'it' is or in what kind of system it exists in.

jcelerier 9y ago
> There is a host of distinctive differences between garbage collection and reference counting. No, reference counting is commonly seen as a specific implementation of garbage collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Reference_counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s... > "Just slap it in a shared pointer" is never a good advice without knowledge what 'it' is or in what kind of system it exists in. I agree, but it seems from their blogpost that they are not sure that their developers are able to handle the "mental overhead" of managing ownership, hence the simple solution of going for shared ownership everytime. (btw, I re-read your post three times and could not find any hint of harshness !)
- fsloth 9y ago
  "No, reference counting is commonly seen as a specific implementation of garbage collection" Shared pointers provide the reference counting, but reference counting alone hardly constitutes a garbage collector because it doesn't collect all of the garbage. For example, shared_ptr:s alone do not automatically detect and collect cycles.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Chapter 5 of The Garbage Collection Handbook. http://gchandbook.org/ http://gchandbook.org/
    - jerf 9y ago
      The dirty secret of the "garbage collection vs. manual memory management" war is that there isn't actually a bright shining line to be drawn anywhere; it's actually a relatively smooth continuum ranging on the one end from statically allocating all values up front (in the style of embedded system) to the dynamic languages on the other end, with dozens of stops in between.

by fsloth 9y ago

jcelerier 9y ago

> There is a host of distinctive differences between garbage collection and reference counting. No, reference counting is commonly seen as a specific implementation of garbage collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Reference_counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s... > "Just slap it in a shared pointer" is never a good advice without knowledge what 'it' is or in what kind of system it exists in. I agree, but it seems from their blogpost that they are not sure that their developers are able to handle the "mental overhead" of managing ownership, hence the simple solution of going for shared ownership everytime. (btw, I re-read your post three times and could not find any hint of harshness !)

fsloth 9y ago
"No, reference counting is commonly seen as a specific implementation of garbage collection" Shared pointers provide the reference counting, but reference counting alone hardly constitutes a garbage collector because it doesn't collect all of the garbage. For example, shared_ptr:s alone do not automatically detect and collect cycles.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Chapter 5 of The Garbage Collection Handbook. http://gchandbook.org/ http://gchandbook.org/
  - jerf 9y ago
    The dirty secret of the "garbage collection vs. manual memory management" war is that there isn't actually a bright shining line to be drawn anywhere; it's actually a relatively smooth continuum ranging on the one end from statically allocating all values up front (in the style of embedded system) to the dynamic languages on the other end, with dozens of stops in between.