Re: Complexity of new hardware

> > To me, "ownership and lifetime" is an important concept in software 
> > engineering.  When is something created, when is it 
> destroyed and what 
> > higher level object is accountable for it? Garbage 
> collection offers 
> > ONE answer to the question of ownership and lifetime:
> > Everyone referencing something share ownership and the 
> lifetime lasts 
> > until it can't be referred to anymore.
> 
> I think that's one of the issues with GC - it conflates 
> ownership and lifetime. Deterministic finalization can 
> certainly be working independently from actual GC. (Which 
> would mean you only worry about lifetime, or ownership, when 
> necessary. As opposed to always - the default C++ model - or 
> never - the default GC model.

I'm not sure I agree with this. If you "own" some resource then it is your
responsibility to "finalise" it. If some other system finalises your object
then you never actually had proper ownership of it to start with.

> >  I feel that having only one answer to the ownership and lifetime 
> > question is very limiting on expressive power. In many cases, a 
> > different approach to ownership and lifetime will give you 
> a superior 
> > design. We sure don't want to live with inferior designs 
> because the 
> > language has a dogmatic and limiting view of ownership and lifetime.
> 
> As anything, it's a trade-off. If I can get a game to market 
> months faster (with the same quality level), I don't care 
> about inferior design. (OK, I'll still complain and moan, but 
> my rational side can see the benefits ;)

IME, for anything other than the smallest projects, inferior design *never*
leads to your product shipping faster.

In general I find that if you're designing a system and you haven't thought
through what object(s) own every other object(s) then you've got it wrong
already. GC just allows you to be lazy in this regard.

(Note that I'm not arguing against shared ownership - just the enforcing of
this style onto everything).

Cheers,
Andrew.




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