Re: gc in GNUstep (Was: soname of gc variant of gnustep-base)

[Markus Hitter]

To pick up an earlier thread ...


Am Montag den, 13. Mai 2002, um 13:58, schrieb Nicola Pero:

> > Maybe it's a little bit off-topic or already discussed to death,
> > but what is the intended use/advantage of Garbage Collection in
> > GNUstep?
>
> Well ... that it is a great feature :-)
>
> I am very happy with manual management of objects and memory, 
> but it's a
> fact that some people prefer automatic garbage collection.  I 
> suppose it's
> a matter of taste.

Not to offend you, but argumenting like this is asking for bloat 
and trouble, IMHO.

Each time you have two similar mechanisms for a goal, one of 
them is obsolete.


> It doesn't really mean you
> must use garbage collecting in your programs ... but that you 
> can use it.

... and you have to learn how it works and how it mixes with the 
other shemes because you want to be able to read and use other's 
code.

What if I retain a to-be-garbage-collected object? Can I release 
it? Or do I have to look into the object's docs to find out what 
to do?


> One of the most difficult and confusing things at
> the beginning is memory management (reference counting, 
> autorelease pools
> etc).  Not that it is terribly difficult, but looks like most of the
> questions and errors and problems that people starting using 
> gnustep have
> are related to memory management.

This is right. How about enhancing the debugging mechanisms 
around NSZombie, -retainCount etc. ?

Would have been quite helpful for me to "see" how the retain 
count raises and lowers when working with objects. 
Unfortunately, asking a -retainCount just gave me a SIGSEGV in 
my first Cocoa steps as the object were already released. About 
NSZombie I learned later. Two thing which could be improved.


That's my € 0.02,
Markus

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/