Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!bnrmtv!ntmtv!hopper
From: hopper@ntmtv.UUCP (Ian Hopper)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Re: Reasons for low reuse
Message-ID: <175@ntmtv.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 89 03:43:32 GMT
Organization: Northern Telecom, Mtn. View, CA
Lines: 24

I have always felt that some form of Garbage Collection is
needed in order to do a decent job on reusable "Collection"
modules.  Since the current favorite language (C++) does
not consistiently (or easily) support GC, we do not see
good quality collection modules.

I believe the Smalltalk books come to the same conclusion, but
neither Smalltalk nor it's creators are perfect.

The classic approach would be to copy-in and copy-out the contents
of such containers, but simply passing pointers to contents is
often much faster.

Do we focus our efforts on languages that have garbage collection,
or are we forced to use the copy-in/copy-out approach?  Regrettably,
the USING code is quite different in the various cases.

Looking forward to responses,
	-- Ian Hopper

PS: Writers of collection modules in GC-based environments should
not forget to create dynamically-expanding versions of their collections.
It is very annoying to have to estimate the size of collections in
advance, things always blow up on large data sets.