Why a Garbage Collector ?

With most modern programming languages there is no such question because garbage collector is built-in. This is not the case with C++, and since I develop the first prototype in this language, I had to anwser it. Do I really need a garbage collector ?

IDR needs a garbage collector because it supports object aggregate encoding and IDR should impose minimal constrains on them. Cycles allowed, minimal difference with local objects, user implemented classes, etc.

Another reason result from the reliance on exception handling. This is the price to pay for using the streaming encoding model. If an exception is generated on the encoder side, it has to be propagated to the decoder. And manual memory management with exceptions can become tricky.

This is why I went into the effort of adding garbage collector support to C++. The good news is that it is planned to be added in the next version of the C++ standard. So the effort to implement IDR in C++ with a temporary solution is not a waste of time.