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Michael Livshin <mike@olan.com> writes: > No. GC does its job well if my program doesn't run out of memory. If > the GC chooses to keep some objects forever because bothering with > them would be inefficient, fine. If a conservative GC never frees > some object because something on the stack looks like a pointer to it, > fine. I don't want to know how the GC does it's magic. I don't want > to open the black box. The GC's contract doesn't explicitly include > object deallocation, though GC *may* deallocate objects to do its job. > > If you want something a la C++'s "resource acquisition is allocation" > pattern, don't assume that GC will help you here. > > I'm not sure we disagree, actually ;). I don't think so either ;). I was thinking of the correctness of the gc, but backwards... what we're really insuring is that we won't free any live objects; taking the time to actually stop and think for a second (I really should do this more often ;'), this doesn't imply that we'll free all dead objects. It's generally a pretty fair assumption that we will, but that doesn't make any guarentee's that they'll be freed within any given period of time, even if we know they're free. -- Greg