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by gwbas1c
11 days ago
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> Of course, I’m pretty sure Go is much better than C at some problems. But there’s no way in hell it supersedes it. C is great when you need to do manual memory management. Most software written today doesn't need to do manual memory management. (And frankly, for the typical software project, manual memory management is a liability.) |
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Need? Not really, not on the desktop (embedded is a different story entirely). But there are still benefits, as well as costs.
Thing is, most programmers have no idea what the actual costs an benefits are, because they have a hopelessly incomplete view of what manual memory management actually is. To them, and this includes long time C++ programmers, manual memory management means calling the general purpose allocator for every little object. At best they’d batch allocation in arrays or vectors, but otherwise it’s RAII for most stuff, and new/malloc() for anything more complicated. This kind of memory management have high costs and low benefits. In some cases the runtime overhead is even greater than using a GC.
And then there are arenas. Much easier to deal with, much lower overhead, much safer, more predictable… They make the cost/benefit analysis completely different, to the point you could ask yourself why you would even bother depending on a GC and the heavy runtime that goes with it.
https://www.dgtlgrove.com/p/untangling-lifetimes-the-arena-a...