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by __d 2407 days ago
Right, so when I’m trying to process a network packet in about a microsecond (a reasonable target for financial trading software), Go’s GC rules it out. Many low-level, high-performance systems language tasks aren’t feasible in Go for similar reasons.

That doesn’t make it a bad language, but it’s not universally applicable either.
3 comments
zenhack 2406 days ago
> but it’s not universally applicable either.

Nothing is universally applicable.

But yeah, I certainly wouldn't use it for hard real-time tasks. If you can't tolerate missing deadlines ever, there is a very short list of acceptable tools.

But (and correct me if I'm wrong; it's not my area) HFT doesn't strike me as hard real-time? See also a sibling comment that asks about Jane Street's OCaml use.

It's not like GC pauses are happening constantly; Go programs don't allocate that much, and a well tuned program can go a long time between collections. It likely is appropriate for many soft or firm real time systems. And you can shut the GC off if there are sections where GC really must not happen:

https://golang.org/pkg/runtime/debug/#SetGCPercent

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__d 2399 days ago
That's how those who use Java do it: write their code to minimize allocations, and then configure the JVM with a GC threshold that's bigger than their whole day's allocations, and manually GC at a suitable time.

Last I looked (a while ago) it seemed like there wasn't quite enough control on the Go GC to do this effectively. It's very likely that's been fixed by now.

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crematoria 2406 days ago
Strange. I know OCaml is used in HFT (thanks to all those Jane Street ads) and OCaml is also GC'd. What does OCaml have here that Go doesn't?
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pjmlp 2406 days ago
Just like in hard real time systems using malloc() rules C out, and its use is explicitly forbidden in certification processes.

I guess C isn't universally applicable either.

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Gibbon1 2406 days ago
The difference is, you can write perfectly usable programs in C without littering the codebase with malloc() and free().
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pjmlp 2406 days ago
Just like you can in Go, as proven by TinyGo.

Or in dozen of other GC enabled systems programming languages for that matter.

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Gibbon1 2406 days ago
Tip: Give up dude.
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pjmlp 2406 days ago
Exactly my tip to the anti-GC luddites.

The difference being evolution, takes care of sorting that out, like in all anti-technology groups throughout mankind history.

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