Question

Will C++ have a garbage collector someday?

Answer 1

Maybe - here is a book that discusses this subject: http://accu.informika.ru/accu/bookreviews/public/reviews/g/g000560.htm

Answer 2

there is also an interesting article at ACCU on this which discusses the issue for various languages: http://accu.org/index.php/journals/244

Answer 3

the latest ACCU edition also has a related article on this called "RAII is not Garbage": http://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/overload106.pdf

Answer 4

But garbage collector is not very good thing because if program is doing something important maybe in medicine and during surgery runs out of memory and then everything freezes and everyone needs to wait for garbage collector to make more space. That's why important programs is written in c++ not in java

Answer 5

Wouldn't the same problem occur even in a C++ application?

Answer 6

you can control memory yourself in c++ but you cant in java

Answer 7

so you can't delete objects yourself in java?

Answer 8

yeah

Answer 9

so it's entirely up to the garbage collector....

write a better garbage collector then!

Answer 10

one that frees stuff as soon as possible.

Answer 11

garbage collector is called only when there's no memory left and then he looks which objects are not used and remove it and try to rearrange memory

Answer 12

i think it wouldn't be efficient to rearrange data every time

Answer 13

modern garbage collectors have improved a lot - so you don't get the old-style "freezing" of your application anymore with these types of "incremental" garbage collectors.
but @Tomas.A is right is stating that C++ gives you much more control over when and how you want to free up your memory.

Answer 14

oh well.... garbage collectors are often written in C and C++ anyway :-P

Answer 15

see here for How Garbage Collection Works in Java: http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/04/garbage-collection-in-java.html

Answer 16

there is also a recent article on InfoQ here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Understanding-Java-Garbage-Collection

Answer 17

yeah my lecturer mentioned that it's possible to have incremental garbage collector but didn't comment anything about it

Answer 18

GC is hard, and there's no efficient way to tell the instant something becomes garbage. That's why you can't just free something as soon as the user is done with it.

That said, there are already a couple of garbage collectors out there for C++, including the Boehm garbage collector: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/