Comment by steveklabnik
6 hours ago
OCaml has often historically been considered a language that's been appropriate to write systems tooling like compilers, runtimes, and unikernels in, even though GC'd languages were/are not often considered for such projects.
They are considered in many research labs since Xerox, unfortunately there are still too much anti-GC religion among mainstream devs.
I don’t think there’s too many of us on the ‘GC did nothing wrong’ hill.
Reading the average HN opinion, it seems everybody is writing high-performance latency-sensitive systems that would implode if a response would take 1 ms longer than normal.
Sampling bias. Most of the people responding are probably those with a strong opinion because of what they work on. Everyone else is likely relatively indifferent to it.
It is a misconception that GCs only affect latency-sensitive systems. High-performance throughput-optimized systems are also sensitive at ~1µs granularity for different reasons, so GCs are not used there either.
That a GC is adverse to the performance both latency-oriented and throughput-oriented workloads doesn't leave many use cases in "high-performance" systems. Maybe systems that are severely I/O bound but is barely a thing these days.
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