Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!microsoft!bobatk
From: bobatk@microsoft.UUCP (Bob ATKINSON)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: C++ and garbage collection
Message-ID: <57850@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 1 Oct 90 16:20:01 GMT
References: <966@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <PCG.90Sep27200339@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk> <1044@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: bobatk@microsoft.UUCP (Bob ATKINSON)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 12

(David Chase) writes:
>However
>(1) Conventional wisdom for Lisp/Smalltalk may not hold for C/C++;
>    Lisp and Smalltalk rely on garbage collection for activation
>    records and real numbers, for instance, and C does not
>    (optimization of Lisp cleans this up somewhat).

Modern implemenations of Smalltalk use processor stack frames for LIFO
activation records, and therefore have little interaction with the 
allocator, let alone the reclaimer. They still, to my knowledge, use
heap-allocated real numbers, but *not* for small integers, which are
far more important.