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Comment by indigo945

1 day ago

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does not already use a GC. The major game engines Unreal and Unity are garbage collected - although they use manual memory management for some of their internals, the exposed API surface (including the C++ API) is designed with garbage collection in mind.

Notably, the popular-with-hobbyists Godot Engine does not use a garbage collector. It uses reference counting with some objects, but does not provide cycle detection, thus requires all objects to be laid out in a tree structure (which the engine is built around).

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indigo945

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pjmlp  1 day ago

Reference counting is chapter 5 on the linked book.

  • indigo945  1 day ago

    I said "a GC", that is, "a garbage collector". Even if you consider reference counting as technically being garbage collection, purely reference counted systems do not have a distinct entity that can be identified as "a" garbage collector. So I'm technically correct here even in face of this pedantry.

    Not that I think it's a reasonable approach to language to be pedantic on this. RC being GC is, of course, true from an analytic approach to language: a garbage collection system is defined as a system that collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; a reference counting pointer collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; therefore, reference counting is garbage collection.

    One problem with this is the vagueness: now, the use of a call stack is garbage collection; after all, returning from a function collects and frees the objects in the stack frame. Leaking memory all over the place and expecting the operation system to clean up when you call `exit()` likewise is "garbage collection".

    But more importantly, it's just not how anyone understands the word. You understood perfectly well what I meant when I said "you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does not already use a GC"; in other words, you yourself don't even understand the word differently. You merely feel an ethical imperative to understand the word differently, and when you failed to do so, used my comment as a stand-in to work through the emotions caused by your own inability to live up to this unfulfilled ethic.

    • pjmlp  8 hours ago

      Except they do, when one bothers to read computer science reference literature, instead of blog posts from folks that learned programming on their own way.

      Being pedantic is required mechanism to fix urban myths, that is how we end up with he says, she says, adultered knowledge.

      All those "garbage collection" variations are exactly the proof what happens when people on the street discuss matters without having a clue about what they are talking about, it is like practice medecine with village recipes "I hear XYZ cures ABC".

      It is not vague, IEEE and ACM have plenty of literature on the matter.

  • pizlonator  1 day ago

    Reference counting isn’t garbage collection.