Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by rossjudson on Sunday March 31, 2024 @01:06AM (#39881607)

Your "properly set up system" is apparently doing nothing other than running your single job. The vast majority of real-world systems have to deal with antagonists.

All of the characteristics you mention are true on production systems used in large scale fleets...and yet "bumps" happen...because there's never one thing happening. It's all the things, and it's always changing.

I'm gonna guess you do finance. A six microsecond fiber oneway is a thing of beauty. There are certain technical luxuries associated with that domain, and rarely any requirement to exhibit high utilization rates...or deal with antagonists running on the same hardware.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by Galanwe on Sunday March 31, 2024 @04:07AM (#39882392)

Finance is one of such use cases, but there's a lot more, and that's the use case for people not using GC, thus why I find this article (and the comment saying 500us is a solved problem) pedantic.

I wrote code profilers for instance, which also need perfectly predictable latency. I worked on L2 and L3 networking applications (bridging, routing, forwarding) that need line rate support. People working on audio sampling, or codecs have the same constraints, etc.

There's a whole world of applications where 500us is ridiculously slow. The article takes the OS as example, but if my OS has 500us random latency spikes, I would be horrified.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers by pebal on Sunday March 31, 2024 @04:46AM (#39882558)

The article doesn't say anything about acceptable pause times. GC can be completely pause-free.

[ Parent | on HN ]