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There are two reasons why C / C++ doesn't have garbage collection. It is "culturally inappropriate". The culture of these languages is to leave storage management to the programmer. It would be technically difficult (and expensive) to implement a precise garbage collector for C / C++.
Drawbacks of garbage collection in Java Garbage collectors bring some runtime overhead that is out of the programmer's control. This could lead to performance problems for large applications that scale large numbers of threads or processors, or sockets that consume a large amount of memory.
Primitive programming languages like C and C++ do not have their garbage collection instead expect the developer to not only allocate the object but also deallocate it explicitly.
C does not have automatic garbage collection. If you lose track of an object, you have what is known as a 'memory leak'. The memory will still be allocated to the program as a whole, but nothing will be able to use it if you've lost the last pointer to it. Memory resource management is a key requirement on C programs.
I was told by a rather smart person that you cannot implement garbage collection in C because of it's weakly typed. The basic idea seems to be that C gives you too much freedom. He mentioned casting pointers without type checking...
I don't really grok the idea. Can someone give me an explanation and possibly a code sample of why this wouldn't work.
NOTE: Obviously C is about speed and why would you want to add garbage collection? I'm just curious really.
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