[ehsanu1]

`it only took Mozilla 2 decades to get Firefox to not leak memory like a sieve`

I'm sure you're aware that this is quite an unfair/exaggerated statement to make. But yes, I'm all in favor of language features that help prevent memory leaks.

But the reason the smart folks at Mozilla don't just switch to using a GC for all of Firefox (as do none of the other major browser vendors) is due to GC pauses sucking for user interaction. If you don't think that's a concern, or have a solution for it, please elaborate.

[TylerE]

I don't see how that's all that unfair. Development on the Mozilla codebase started in early 1998, almost 16 years ago.

[ehsanu1]

Memory leaks waxed and waned as development focus changed. I remember Firefox's memory usage being quite decent around version 2, and even into 3. Later, some things got bloated, though a large part of the memory problem was due to misbehaving plugins. The memshrink project managed to fix even memory leaks across plugin authors' projects.

Also, note that a GC does not automatically mean no memory leaks. For instance, see how leaky Gmail is (was worse according to their dev team).