Re: [xsl] concern of garbage collection with functional languages

["Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2016-09-27 at 03:26 +0000, Mukul Gandhi gandhi.mukul@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> B B B I've been reading in computer science literature off late, that
> implementing functional languages behind the hoods do not do garbage
> collection (good languages must do garbage collection).
"citation needed" (as Wikipedia puts it) for this nonsense :)

Functional languages have been doing garbage collection for some 50
years. There have been tons of papers on how to do it - e.g. with
reachability analysis or with reference counting. Garbage Collection
was first described in 1962 for LISP, but that language had procedural
aspects; the ISWIM family of languages in 1966 had garbage collection
(see the 1966 paper by Landin).

Other language implentations with GC have included ML, Lua, Prolog
(declarative, I think rather than FP, if one is being pedantic),
Haskell, OCaml, almost all LISP dialects, Erlang, Scheme, even
SmallTalk.

> Can this be a
> concern for a language like XSLT? Particularly, XSLT 1.0 version
> where
> MSXML is not implemented in Java (that offers automatic garbage
> collection)?

The implementation language is nothing at all to do with whether the
compiler/interpreter does runtime garbage collection itself.

Liam


-- 
Liam R. E. Quin <liam@xxxxxx>
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)