Comment by keyle
3 years ago
from your page
The most significant feature of Virgil that is not in other mainstream languages is the concept of initialization time. To avoid the need for a large runtime system that dynamically manages heap memory and performs garbage collection, Virgil does not allow applications to allocate memory from the heap at runtime. Instead, the Virgil compiler allows the application to run initialization routines at compilation time, while the program is being compiled. These initialization routines allow the program to pre-allocate and initialize all data structures that it will need at runtime
Is that basically Swift's ARC?
You pulled that from the UCLA site, which is the microcontroller version from 15 years ago. That version actually burned the entire heap into the binary and did not allow dynamic allocation. In that case, no GC, write barriers, allocation, etc was necessary.
Today's Virgil (on GitHub) does allow dynamic allocation, but you can still initialize an arbitrarily large heap at compile time. It's not really related to ARC.
Oh ok thanks, sorry I just google the name trying to answer my GC related question. Maybe I missed it when skimming the github page, couldn't see a mention of memory management.