I can't believe we've managed to have this lengthy of a discussion about GC languages and speed without anyone mentioning rust. Has HN turned a corner?
In what concerns me, although I like Rust, I only see it for scenarios where any kind of memory allocation is very precious, Ada/SPARK and MISRA-C style.
I have been using GC languages with C++ like features, or polyglot codebases, for almost 20 years to think otherwise.
Most of the time developers learn about new and miss out on the low level language features.
It is a matter of balance, either trying to do everything in a single language, or eventually write a couple of functions in a lower level language that are then used as building blocks for the rest of the application.
No need to throw away the ecosystem and developer tooling just to rewrite a data structure.
There are many, many arena implementations available with varying characteristics. It's disingenuous to act like Rust requires the author of an arena library to write "unsafe" everywhere.
In what concerns me, although I like Rust, I only see it for scenarios where any kind of memory allocation is very precious, Ada/SPARK and MISRA-C style.
I have been using GC languages with C++ like features, or polyglot codebases, for almost 20 years to think otherwise.
Most of the time developers learn about new and miss out on the low level language features.
It is a matter of balance, either trying to do everything in a single language, or eventually write a couple of functions in a lower level language that are then used as building blocks for the rest of the application.
No need to throw away the ecosystem and developer tooling just to rewrite a data structure.