on GUIs and such things

[Norman Hardy]

At 23:41 -0700 00/07/20, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:

...

>True enough.  But I don't think it happens much in practice.  And you
>don't have to overwrite every unused pointer, just the top one which
>points to the entire substructure that is no longer needed.  Most
>objects belong to something which belongs to something which ... belongs
>to a local variable in a method somewhere anyway.  When the method exits,
>all the local variables and everything under them are garbage collected,
>to the extent that none of the objects have other pointers to them
>elsewhere.  So I think this is why memory leaks in Java are so rare.
>I don't know as much about how a typical Lisp GC works.
>

I have seen several real problems with Java and Scheme. Keykos and EROS
provide a principled, if not trivial, way to track down these problems.
These techniques could be retrofitted to languages as we had planned for
Trusty Scheme <http://www.mediacity.com/~norm/CapTheory/SKBLC.html>.
Norman Hardy  <http://www.mediacity.com/~norm>