Eric S. Raymond (esr@thyrsus.com) writes:
> willy@thepuffingroup.com <willy@thepuffingroup.com>:
> > On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 08:45:50PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > Basically, because managing memory by hand for this kind of application is
> > > more pain than I want to go through. And the resulting program in C would
> > > be far more complex and bug-prone.
> >
> > why even bother keeping track of memory? this is a run-and-exit program;
> > the memory you used gets freed at exit.
>
> That's not anywhere near a complete solution. Please trust me on
> this, because otherwise I'd have to give you a longer brain dump on
> the engineering of compilers and interpreters and the shortcomings of
> C than I have time for right now.
Why should we? What "shortcomings"? You mean, like you have to free
what you malloc? That's not a "shortcoming", that's just laziness. On the
other hand, you are right - *not* keeping track of memory necause it's just
a "run-and-exit" program is also programmer laziness.
It's easy enough to write routines that will do the memory management stuff
for you, and the C program would *not* be much more complex, nor would it
be much more error prone. Just because you don't want to, or don't have the
time, is no reason to try and trash C.
> I've written more of these than I can easily remember, it's my specialty.
> It can be done in C (and about half of my projects demonstrate that I know
> both the words and the music of that tune) but you sure don't want to unless
> the production speed of the compiler/interpreter is a drop-dead issue.
Oh, stop it before it becomes a religious issue. You are right, but only from
your own perspective. From my perspective, from someone who has written
literally thousands of lines of production C, it's *always* an issue. People
who ignore performance or memory issues are fools who assume that everyone
is going to be running their code on the latest PIII with a gig of RAM.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com 940/367-2744 cell phone http://www.pobox.com/~erc- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 31 2000 - 21:00:13 EST