Why many programmers don't like GC?

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 10:12:23 UTC 2021


On Saturday, 16 January 2021 at 00:20:16 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> It's certainly true that in team dynamics, without any reward, 
> efficiency can be victim to a tragedy of commons.
>
> Well, any software invariant is harder to hold if the 
> shareholders don't care.
> (be it "being fast", or "being correct", or other invariants).

Yes, although for Open Source I think the "mental model" you 
talked about is more of an issue. How many people working on DMD 
has good mental model of it? It is a bit easier for programs like 
Gimp that can be "plugin" style. I guess Phobos is also "plugin" 
style, so it is easier to improve Phobos than DMD, because of the 
"mental model" issue.

Maybe Open Source projects should be designed more for simple 
mental models (with "plugins") than for high throughput too. 
Maybe we can have languages that are better for Open Source by 
making it easier to make extensions of the software with only 
local impacts.

Maybe it would be better for DMD to move away from "thread local" 
thinking and instead have a thread pool and stackless actors. 
Then tie local non-incremental garbage collection to actors. 
Useful for application development and servers, but not so useful 
for audio-plugins. So, you would probably not want it...





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