For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by geocar on Thursday May 09, 2019 @07:27AM (#19867171)

> GC is whatever technology that enables what you've called automatic memory management: a kind of illusion that there is infinite memory, from the programmer's perspective.

That's definitely not what McCarthy meant by it. I understand that's probably a common view nontheless, but I can use sbrk() and the fact my computer has gobs of ram/swap, and I'm not going to call that garbage collection. I don't think this definition is useful.

If you re-read what I wrote now understanding what I mean when I say "garbage collection", perhaps we can talk about strategies for providing that infinite view of memory instead.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by barrkel on Thursday May 09, 2019 @05:44PM (#19872736)

Actually, I think process termination is pretty useful as garbage collection. It's normally much more reliable for releasing resources, for one thing. And there's little sense in cleaning up RAM when you're just going to quit.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by geocar on Friday May 10, 2019 @08:19AM (#19877015)

The kernel still deallocated those pages as an explicit [manual] result of a free-like call -- that just so happens to be named exit().

To seriously tell people that every C program running on unix has automatic "garbage collection" built-in seems like it would create very confusing conversations.

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