Comment by SvenL

5 days ago

On the other hand memory management in web applications is quite easy. Most of the stuff is only required for the lifetime of a request. Some stuff needs to be available the whole application life time.

You can do this with other languages (C# for example) as well. Memory is so cheap, though, that most companies should spend their money on increasing memory rather than on paying programmers to optimize memory usage.

  • I don't think memory usage is the problem, but rather allocation costs and memory layout, i.e. performance.

    Serving web traffic simply isn't a very memory hungry task.

  • Yes, for most use cases it doesn’t really matter which language is chosen.

    Regarding just spending more money on memory - I agree that it’s definitely cheaper but it’s not only about wasting bytes of memory. If the garbage collector has a lot of work to do it may also impact response time/throughput.

    And yes, C# did a pretty good job with implementing mechanisms for reducing allocations on a language level. This definitely helps to reduce garbage collection.