Re: GC pros and cons
Re: GC pros and cons
- Subject: Re: GC pros and cons
- From: Philip Aker <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 01:02:24 -0700
On 2009-06-30, at 08:11:20, Bill Bumgarner wrote:
On Jun 30, 2009, at 4:03 AM, Philip Aker wrote:
On 2009-06-25, at 11:11:56, Andy Lee wrote:
Just to be clear, Hamish wrote:
> Compilers conforming to C99 I would trust.
> gcc -fobjc-gc... not so much.
Meaning to me that C99 is a direct descendent of C89 and K&R before
that. So that means roughly 30 years of evolvement and nit-picking
high and low by a lot of people on nearly all platforms extant.
Objective-C 2.0 doesn't seem to have a published standard (like
with a language syntax summary as in Appendix A of C99). Apple has
a track record of introducing stuff that is subsequently dumped.
And gosh, I might not like to be the one who trusted in GC to be
around forever and then found out I had to account for all those
[[NSThing alloc] initWithImpunity:…] calls in Mac OS X 10.7.
Language features can't be removed, nor can languages be changed
rapidly.
Sure and especially for languages that have a standard. I haven't been
able to find a published standard for Objective-C 2.0. Say something
analogous to n1256 for C99 or the XSD 1.1 recommendation from W3C.
What I have is a few informal documents from Apple. The sum of these
don't constitute a language standard. They only remark what is
currently in vogue at Apple.
The features added to Objective-C have been considered extremely
carefully and added with great care.
I don't doubt that at all. But that's not the same as having a formal
language description. I'm not sure if the term "peer reviewed" is
appropriate, but Objective-C as it stands is an Apple-only technology.
That's not the same kind of scrutiny C99 and many other languages come
under for their standards submissions.
In the past, changes to the compiler have been integrated back into
GCC in a relatively timely fashion. Things have changed; now most
of the feature work in Objective-C, including Blocks, is actually
developed in the open LLVM repository.
Furthermore, Apple is participating actively in the ANSI C standards
committee. Both Garbage Collection and Blocks have been presented
to the committee and there is traction for both.
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/PostMarkham.htm
And, more specifically:
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1370.pdf
I didn't notice any mention of a submission to the C standard in the
PDF of <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/GarbageCollection/Introduction.html
>. So thanks for mentioning it. When that's passed, I'll have less
doubts about GC permanence (assuming Objective-C will be a superset of
C at that point) but more importantly, have something in C that passes
muster on other machine and OS combinations.
Philip Aker
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