> I don't think there is a direct relationship, actually. Other, easier > to maintain compilers, are quite happy without a GC. I do agree, > however, that a bad memory management system leads to maintainability > issues. We definitely do not want to fall into the obstack nightmare.
I agree completely with this. GC can make it easier to write code because you don't have to worry about memory management and, in that sense, it improves maintainablility. But it can make a bug that would previously have taken 10 minutes to be one that takes days of careful work to find because it's now become intermittent. Obstack issues were one of the hardest to debug in the past and that was even though it's a relatively controlled form of "GC" and there were ways, using conditional breakpoints, to get a handle on what was going on.
