[ Just one more mail and I promise to shut up on this topic... :-) ] Fergus Henderson wrote:
[...] C does suffer from many of the same problems as C. But in C++, it is much easier to automate techniques like reference counting, which can be done manually in C but are much more cumbersome and error-prone when done manually.
Granted, C++'s (copy) constructors, destructors and assignment operators make some things relatively easy compared to C, but the complexity of handling exceptions *correctly* makes things worse again: There is a famous article (I can't remember the title or the author) where a well-known C++ grandmaster explains a stack class, but another later article by someone else describes the numerous bugs in that class when exceptions are taken into account. And one final remark on Haskell and Java: In large projects in those languages you usually get the "genuine" space leaks in those languages plus all those nice little leaks from the ubiquitous native functions/methods. So you have to debug in at least two languages at the same time and I haven't seen combined tool support for this yet... :-P * * * Cheers, S.