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by Decabytes 27 days ago
I know that many garbage collected languages have ways of reducing gc pressure by minimizing classes, and pushing more things on the stack. I’ve even heard how languages like Java will allocate a massive amount of memory in the beginning, and then turn. Off the garbage collector for the whole day in high frequency trading scenarios.

Having never been in this situation, I wonder how difficult it is to bend a garbage collected language to behave like a non garbage collected one
2 comments
zozbot234 27 days ago
It's always difficult to have GC and non-GC objects interact seamlessly. You have to allow GC object finalizers to drop non-GC data, and non-GC objects to register GC objects they might reference as temporary roots (keep them alive) or somehow allow the GC tracing pass to discover what they might be referencing. And you still can't involve non-GC objects in any cycles, they have to be neatly self-contained leaf-like or tree-like sections of your reference graph.
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pjmlp 27 days ago
Depends if the language supports value types and stack allocation or not.

Many GC languages do so.

The hard part is that the difference is part of the type system, and you might need to refactor some code moving between value and reference types.

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