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Re: robustness vs. conservative GC
Tom:
> You push in here and it pops out there. This design would seem to to
> raise the probability of incorrectly failing to collect some genuinely
> dead objects, which is an unpredictable and uncontrollable source of
> arbitrarilly catastrophic failure, sufficiently improbable to escape
> most testing, and sufficiently serious that it ought not be ignored or
> swept under the rug with vague (and inaccurate) replies such as "the
> resulting leaks only waste a little memory" (a specific reply I do not
> attribute to Hans).
Hans:
I usually distinguish [...]
After reading the omitted parts of your reply, I stand by original
statement, except that it would have been more accurate to say
"unpreventable" instead of "uncontrollable", since the alluded to
failures can be deliberately caused -- a form of control which
undermines the value of conservative collectors in numerous
applications.
-t