Re:A Path to Enlightenment in Programming Language Theory
by ufo on Monday June 22, 2015 @07:52PM
(#9761894)
Thats because tutorial material is going to keep things simple. If you really want to implement a garbage collector on your own then you should go looking for an advanced compiler book instead of a tutorial.
Right, but a lot of the tutorial material in this area doesn't really consider that issue, even though it's rather fundamental to practical applications. Instead the explanation often settles for some sort of indirect dependency on the implementation language's existing version of a similar feature. I think this is unfortunate, not least because it reduces us to a model where most people implementing these ideas depend on some sort of magic run-time environment instead of learning how to actually write that run-time.