GoAWK: an AWK interpreter written in Go

Re:GoAWK: an AWK interpreter written in Go by dymk on Sunday November 18, 2018 @01:16AM (#18479112)

The point is, the default decision should be to not have to worry about memory management. Most application shoudn't, because they're not realtime operating systems, or in an environment where memory must be allocated statically.

Almost all unix command line utilities fall into this category. Having to worry about pairing your `free`s with your `malloc`s is a strict increase in cognitive overhead, which should have been spent on verifying the program's semantics are correct.

Messing up low-level memory operations, when you just want to worry about semantic correctness, potentially leads to bugs like RCEs, or dosing somebody with too much radiation.

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Re:GoAWK: an AWK interpreter written in Go by burntsushi on Sunday November 18, 2018 @09:43AM (#18480574)

Thankfully, these days, you don't actually need to choose between GC and manually matching up your `free`s with your `malloc`s.

There is at least some data that GC does have an impact on command line tools like this: https://boyter.org/posts/sloc-cloc-code/ --- More experiments like that would be great to crystallize the exact trade offs here.

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