On Thursday, 14 January 2021 at 10:05:51 UTC, Guillaume Piolat
wrote:
On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 18:58:56 UTC, Marcone wrote:
I've always heard programmers complain about Garbage Collector
GC. But I never understood why they complain. What's bad about
GC?
Languages where the GC usage is unavoidable (Javascript and
Java) have created a lot of situations where there is a GC
pause in realtime program and the cause is this dynamically
allocated memory. So a lot of people make their opinion of GC
while using setup where you couldn't really avoid it.
Indeed, but I don't think we should underestimate the perceived
value of having a minimal runtime. Like, if D had a better GC
solution that involved an even heavier runtime, it would still be
a big issue for people interested in low level system programming.
Transparency is an issue. System level programming means you want
to have a clear picture of what is going on in the system at all
levels, all the way down to the hardware. If you cannot
understand how the runtime works you also cannot fix issues... so
a simple runtime is more valuable than a feature rich complex
runtime.
That is kinda what defines system level programming: you know
exactly what every subsystem is doing so that you can anticipate
performance/resource issues. And that is the opposite of high
level programming where you make no assumptions about the
underlying machinery and only care about the abstract
descriptions of language semantics.
