Comment by jeremiep

Blaming the GC for poor memory performance isn't the issue.

I still wouldn't call that a workaround but rather properly using memory in the first place; you'll get GC pressure even on a concurrent generational GC if you constantly push garbage down its throat. You'll get slowdowns even on reference counting if you naively assume it to be faster than a GC then blindly pass references all over the place causing tons of increments/decrements on the refcount; trashing caches in the process and causing tons of branch mispredictions.

I've worked on a LOT of radically different games; I don't believe the specific game, genre, engine or language changes how you manage memory, at all. I don't even believe its more work when you account for all the debugging and profiling time you save by the end of the project; a data-driven approach is almost always simpler. Heck Unity is even moving towards a new Entity-Component-System that explicitly relies on the user managing their memory (and in batches too!), with massive performance gains, same for the Job system currently in the 2018.1 beta. We're talking gains of orders of magnitude in performance, not the tiny ~10% gains you'd get profiling and micro-optimizing at the end of a project.

Beginners and intermediates don't manage memory on large scale Unity projects, and memory management isn't nearly as important on smaller ones; they can waste 80% of hardware resources and still hit 60FPS, computers are that fast. So I don't think that's a valid point. Also saying my data is different than your data may be true, but that has no impact on how memory management works whatsoever. Just like you don't stop using SQL because a different app has different relations.

Its almost impossible to get any kind of performance without accounting for memory allocations and layouts, no matter the engine/language you pick. You're bound to waste 90% of the hardware while being left profiling within the remaining 10% from the very second you stop thinking about memory. I really dont get this "again, quite a bit of work" you mention; idiomatic C# is literally more work than data-driven C# at a fraction of its performance and simplicity.

I've seen death by a thousand cuts "we enter crunch mode for months because the game is dog slow before shipping because nobody cared about architecture for 10+ months" kill many game projects; they all had fancy idiomatic code, everything looked good in the profiler yet the problems were systematic. Its pretty much being Agile without having any actual agility.

So I repeat: blaming the GC for poor memory performance isn't the issue. I'll bet I find tons of complexity issues long, long before I see GC issues in any codebase; that's the real issue. Its not that the GC is one huge slowdown, its that the codebase is littered with tiny slowdowns all over the place, so tiny they're effectively invisible to the profiler, yet their sum is still greater than that of the GC.