Warp wrote:
>   How is that nondeterministic? It's perfectly predictable when those
> objects will be destroyed. Just because destroying one object causes
> the destruction of another doesn't make it "nondeterministic".

You can't tell by looking at
   a = null;
how long it will take to execute that statement.

It depends entirely on how long the system has been running, how much 
data is hanging off pointers in "a", and so on. I.e., you get the same 
sort of stop-and-wait-for-GC that you get with mark-and-sweep.

This is usually people talking about things close to real time but not 
critical enough to actually figure out how long it would take, like 
games and such.

If "a" points to a parsed XML file read from a file specified by the 
user, you don't know how long it'll take to collect it, as an example.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

Post a reply to this message