We program industrial embedded Java devices such as JStamp/JStik, and C code on Atmel AVRs. The AVR C doesn't have any GC, or even malloc and free - it's all static. We get by fine actually, but these are relatively small, focussed low level apps. Deterministic behavior is essential. So is hard realtime performance. This comes for free with C and careful programming, even on a 16 Kbyte (code) and 1 KByte (data) device. Using I/O and timer interrupts we can create the equivalent of simple multi-threading apps with basically zero overhead.
On the small embedded java devices (CLDC, with 2-4 MBytes Flash and 512 KBytes or more RAM) we can choose to use GC or not, and sometimes we have a single thread which does not use GC (and in fact can pre-empt it with ~1 usec context switch).
So my point in recounting all that is that programming without GC or with limited GC is likely to be with us for a long time, at least on resource-constrained embedded devices. There GC is the exception, not the norm. And such devices run the machines and equipment all around us. |
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