Comment by adrian_b
12 hours ago
You mean "interleave deallocation and business logic everywhere".
For allocation there is no difference between automatic memory management with garbage collectors or reference counts and manual memory management, where the programmer is responsible for invoking "free".
These alternative memory management methods differ only in how deallocation is handled.
Allocation must always be done by defining a new object, regardless of how memory is managed. Moreover, allocation also does not depend on whether an object is allocated in static storage, in a stack or in a heap. You always must define the object, so that memory should be allocated for it at compile-time if in static storage, or at run-time if in a stack or in a heap.
Well, it's true that most of the noise comes from deallocation but I did mention types for good reasons: having your code littered with std::shared_ptr (or worse for Rust where encoding lifetime goes much further than Rc/Arc) is a direct consequence of wanting GC without a global one.
The source of my second revelation: GC should be opt-out (e.g. SBCL's arena system) instead of opt-in via refcounted types.
While C and C++ have ugly syntaxes for "malloc", "std::shared_ptr" and the like, it is quite easy to mask that ugliness by using macros and writing thus only cleanly-looking programs, without any noise words and symbols around dynamic allocations.
In general, by using macros it is possible to transform so much a C or C++ program, that it becomes unrecognizable as C/C++ and it can mimic reasonably well any other programming language that you might fancy.
The problem is when you work in a team, because even if everyone will agree that such programming languages have great deficiencies, it would be impossible to reach a consensus about how the ideal programming language should look like, so eventually the team remains stuck with writing programs in the ugly standard manner.