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by wild_egg 22 days ago
Why does having. GC mean not thinking about memory? I think about memory constantly in GC languages because I still want it to perform well.

The biggest difference is the failure modes. If I'm not thinking about memory, my RSS is higher or a bit of extra CPU time goes to GC. Both of those are radically better than UAF or buffer overruns. Good trade IMO.
1 comments
tjoff 22 days ago
I didn't say that. But if you think about memory then GC does more harm than good because you have no help from the language.

A GC is not the only fix for UAF and buffer overruns...

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pjmlp 20 days ago
Depends very much which programming languages we're talking about.

There are enough managed languages with knobs allowing to do C like coding when required to do so.

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tjoff 20 days ago
Which is about as convenient as opt-in types in python. Nice to have but but a poor substitute and requires much more diligence than if it was designed for it in the first place.
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wild_egg 20 days ago
That really, really depends on the language.
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pjmlp 20 days ago
It is perfectly convenient across D, Modula-2+, Modula-3, C#, Nim, Swift, Oberon, C++/CLI, and plenty others.
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