Comment by pjmlp
6 hours ago
They are considered in many research labs since Xerox, unfortunately there are still too much anti-GC religion among mainstream devs.
6 hours ago
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.
> Maybe systems that are severely I/O bound but is barely a thing these days.
Any kind of web service is barely a thing today? Which is what 99% of HN posters are working on, hence my comment.
> High-performance throughput-optimized systems are also sensitive at ~1µs granularity for different reasons, so GCs are not used there either
Games are high-performance throughput-optimized systems that have adopted GC languages for 15+ years now, and again a type of application which is much more latency sensitive than most people deal in their day to day.
Nobody is claiming GC is a panacea, but it’s good enough for a lot more use cases people give it credit for.
Could you elaborate on "GCs are not used there [high-performance throughput-optimized systems]"? Are you referring to the cascading effects of tail latency on systems with high fanout?
Not to mention that in general GC simply requires more memory.