News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on GC Fun at Twitch.

Re:GC Fun at Twitch by arcticbull on Saturday November 16, 2019 @03:51AM (#21551680)
This reminds me of why I hate garbage collectors and think we shouldn't keep investing in them. Instead, we should double down on languages that allow you to express liveness constraints in a way the compiler can understand and manage statically. I'm not saying we have the perfect one yet, though continuing to add knobs to a gooey ball of complexity is at best a game of whack-a-mole. Do something you haven't planned for and your whole app or service takes a dirt-nap and you need to call in a crack squad of your most senior engineers. Then what? Uh, maybe allocate 11GB? There's no predictability -- or even causality -- to these optimizations.

There's enough rockets on the rocket-powered horse that is GC to make it to the moon and back.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GC Fun at Twitch by pjmlp on Saturday November 16, 2019 @05:54AM (#21552012)
What we should do is learn that many GC enabled languages also offer other means to manage resources, and increase adoption of such features, instead of throwing the baby with baby water, just because a couple of them use GC for everything.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GC Fun at Twitch by arcticbull on Monday November 18, 2019 @02:50PM (#21567516)
GC is a means not an ends and we shouldn't be attached to it. We should focus on developing languages that allow the compiler to statically assess and infer lifetimes then we don't need a giant for loop over all of active memory. The value GC provides is it gives the developer an escape-rope from an insufficiently expressive language. If that solution involves some form of GC so be it, but the goal should not be to preserve GC but rather to improve the efficiency of the final product without substantially impacting developer ergonomics.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GC Fun at Twitch by pjmlp on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @04:38AM (#21571680)
So far that sufficiently expressive language, usable by mainstream developers is yet to be invented, and no Rust isn't yet it, too many hurdles to overcome in common programming patterns.
[ Parent | on HN ]