A couple of years ago, I wrote a set of three essays on Resource Management: The Semantics of Garbage Collection, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, and Other Resource Recovery Approaches. In summary, my argument in these articles was that the standard mark-and-sweep garbage collection falls down for two major reasons, it doesn’t deal with any… Read More »
This is a very simple concept that seems to escape many people. In fact, most of the multi-threaded code I’ve seen shows a distinct misunderstanding of this basic fact. Very often people seem to think that a mutex should protect a section of code. I think this misconception may have been caused by the term… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. In the next article, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, I traced some of the history and side effects… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. Many programmers have been indoctrinated with the belief that garbage collection is the solution to all memory problems,… Read More »
I have a confession to make. I’ve never really been comfortable with garbage collection. Now, before you dismiss me as a Luddite who has obviously never worked with an advanced programming language, let me explain. I’m familiar with many different forms of garbage collection. I have worked in languages with and without garbage collection. I’ve… Read More »
What does it mean for an object to die? In C++, there are several distinct and well-defined stages in the death of an object. Other languages do this a little differently, but the general concepts remain the same. This is the basic chain of events for an item on the stack. Object becomes inaccessible Object… Read More »