On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:38:15 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
(...)
While I understand that some people can't afford a GC, this has
confused me as well.
I never understood the large amount of people on /r/programming
complaining about the GC when the vast majority of software is
written in one of the following languages: C#, Java, PHP,
Python, JavaScript. Those have to cover at least 80% of all
software projects in the US and not only do they have a GC,
they force you to use a GC. This just shows to me that
/r/programming is not a representative sample of programmers at
all.
The anti D's GC thing has become meme at this point. I have
literally seen only one person on /r/programming complain about
Go's GC, despite Go being a slower language overall.
People constantly raise the argument that some large fraction
(e.g. 80%) of software in all languages is written with GC just
fine. This is missing a few points:
- It is often not "just fine" even if they use it. Authors
sometimes don't realize that GC would be a liability in their
projects until its too late. Then they fight it. Also, people may
be forced to use GC because libraries they need use GC.
- Most people don't actively want GC, they just want
productivity. Whether its GC that gives it or something else,
they don't care. If something else was providing productivity,
people wouldn't care that its not GC. Cpython uses reference
counding as its GC strategy. Do you think most people care?
- The minority of applications which cannot use GC is not
necessarily also a minority in economic value or in the number of
running copies. Most of all applications are usually one-off
internal business apps or scientific experiments. Also for every
10 programs there are probably 8 bad ones. Hence, the number of
applications is a pretty silly metric. Note that non-GC
applications are often multi-million dollar operating systems,
AAA games, control software, AI software and server software.
