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A comment on Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers. Parent comment

Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by ngrilly on Saturday March 30, 2024 @03:06PM (#39877646)
> Also, given that tracing GCs are used by ~90% the market, they hardly require justification anymore; they've won by a large margin over the application space (which constitutes most of software).

Tracing GCs have clearly proven themselves and are everywhere (JVM, CLR, Go, Dart, OCaml, etc.) but we can't ignore that the Apple ecosystem (Swift) is using ARC. That's a significant share of the "market". Python and Ruby also use reference counting, but I don't think anyone is considering them state-of-the-art GC.

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Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by zozbot234 on Saturday March 30, 2024 @03:09PM (#39877672)
Except that obligate ARC ala Swift has even lower throughput than obligate tracing GC. It's the worst possible choice unless you really care about low-latency and deterministic freeing of resources (and even then, using RAII for common tree-like allocation patterns like Rust does will perform better).
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Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by pron on Saturday March 30, 2024 @03:18PM (#39877742)
You're right, I should have said "languages where GC is the primary means of managing heap memory are used by 90% of the market" rather than focused on a specific algorithm.
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Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by ngrilly on Saturday March 30, 2024 @03:23PM (#39877792)
Yes, this is quite fascinating how GC replaced manual memory management in most apps over the last 20~30 years.
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Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by yxhuvud on Sunday March 31, 2024 @09:50AM (#39884240)
Ruby does not use reference counting. It has a mark and sweep generational gc that is incremental and use compaction. I doubt it would be state of the art, but it is not too bad nowadays.
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Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by ngrilly on Sunday March 31, 2024 @10:43AM (#39884730)
My mistake. Thanks for correcting.
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