Why doesn't C++ have a garbage collector?

Question

I'm not asking this question because of the merits of garbage collection first of all. My main reason for asking this is that I do know that Bjarne Stroustrup has said that C++ will have a garbage collector at some point in time.

With that said, why hasn't it been added? There are already some garbage collectors for C++. Is this just one of those "easier said than done" type things? Or are there other reasons it hasn't been added (and won't be added in C++11)?

Cross links:

• Garbage collectors for C++

Just to clarify, I understand the reasons why C++ didn't have a garbage collector when it was first created. I'm wondering why the collector can't be added in.

Answer 1

When you compare C++ with Java, you can see immediately that C++ was not designed with implicit Garbage Collection in mind, while Java was.

Having things like arbitrary pointers in C-Style and deterministic destructors does not only slow down the performance of GC-implementations, it would also destroy backward compatibility for a large amount of C++-legacy-code.

In addition to that, C++ is a language that is intended to run as standalone executable instead of having a complex run-time environment.

All in all: Yes it would be possible to add Garbage Collection to C++, but for the sake of continuity it is better not to do so. The cost of doing so would be greater than the benefit.

Answer 2

If you want automatic garbage collection, there are good commercial and public-domain garbage collectors for C++. For applications where garbage collection is suitable, C++ is an excellent garbage collected language with a performance that compares favorably with other garbage collected languages. See The C++ Programming Language (3rd Edition) for a discussion of automatic garbage collection in C++. See also, Hans-J. Boehm's site for C and C++ garbage collection. Also, C++ supports programming techniques that allows memory management to be safe and implicit without a garbage collector.

Source: http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#garbage-collection

As for why it doesnt have it built in, If I remember correctly it was invented before GC was the thing, and I don't believe the language could have had GC for several reasons(I.E Backwards compatibilty with C)

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

One of the biggest reasons that C++ doesn't have built in garbage collection is that getting garbage collection to play nice with destructors is really, really hard. As far as I know, nobody really knows how to solve it completely yet. There are alot of issues to deal with:

• deterministic lifetimes of objects (reference counting gives you this, but GC doesn't. Although it may not be that big of a deal).
• what happens if a destructor throws when the object is being garbage collected? Most languages ignore this exception, since theres really no catch block to be able to transport it to, but this is probably not an acceptable solution for C++.
• How to enable/disable it? Naturally it'd probably be a compile time decision but code that is written for GC vs code that is written for NOT GC is going to be very different and probably incompatible. How do you reconcile this?

These are just a few of the problems faced.

Answer 4

Imposing garbage collection is really a low level to high level paradigm shift.

If you look at the way strings are handled in a language with garbage collection, you will find they ONLY allow high level string manipulation functions and do not allow binary access to the strings. Simply put, all string functions first check the pointers to see where the string is, even if you are only drawing out a byte. So if you are doing a loop that processes each byte in a string in a language with garbage collection, it must compute the base location plus offset for each iteration, because it cannot know when the string has moved. Then you have to think about heaps, stacks, threads, etc etc.