CompuServe Messages

>>Just for the sake of discussion, that same advantage can be a disadvantage. As with everything, it depends upon what you are trying to do and is not 100% to allow you to concentrate on other aspects of coding. That is to say, for something it can indeed free you "from the concern." On others, this freedom can be quite intrusive. As such, as with everything, it should be used as deemed appropriate.<< I see, sort of. I have experience with at least one program that I wrote, in which deciding how to free things was a major problem (at least, for me). Garbage collection would have made that task much easier. Since I don't have much experience with garbage collecting allocators, I don't really know what trouble they can cause. I can imagine that one might occasionally have to worry about zeroing a pointer to make sure something is freed (may as well free it explicitly). The allocation package I mentioned also has variants on plain malloc, and having to think about which to use might be a problem. "GC_malloc_atomic" allocates memory in which you promise not to store any pointers to other allocated memory, so that the collector doesn't have to look there. There is also "GC_malloc_ignore_off_page," which is intended for large blocks of memory. Your program is supposed to keep a pointer to someplace in the first 256 bytes, so that the collector won't worry about pointers into the rest of the block. Since the collector just searches all known variables (the stack, static variables, and allocated memory pointed to from there), it can find accidental pointers into a block of memory and keep it, incorrectly. This version of malloc avoids a lot of that. Apparently, you need to declare a pointer to such a block as a "volatile", to keep optimizers from mucking it up somehow. Clearly this is something we don't have to think about with the usual versions of malloc, et al. >>Enough people have put it to rest and seems to be slowly and surely more and more. This is no real suprise.<< It's understandable, but I'd rather not believe it. Did I mention the C++ interface? Clay