The "no gc" crowd

[Elvis Zhou]

On Tuesday, 8 October 2013 at 23:05:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 10/8/2013 12:34 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> I think that it's clear that for some projects, it's critical 
>> to minimize the
>> GC, and I think that it's clear that we need to do a better 
>> job of supporting
>> the folks who want to minimize GC usage, but I also think that 
>> for the vast
>> majority of cases, complaints about the GC are way overblown. 
>> It becomes an
>> issue when you're doing a lot of heap allocations, but it's 
>> frequently easy to
>> design D code so that heap allocations are relatively rare 
>> such that they
>> aren't going to be a serious problem outside of code which is 
>> performance
>> critical to the point that it would be worrying about the cost 
>> of malloc
>> (which most code isn't). Personally, the only time that I've 
>> run into issues
>> with the GC is when trying to do use RedBlackTree with a lot 
>> of items. That
>> has a tendancy to tank performance.
>>
>> So, yes, it's problem. Yes, we need to improve the situaton. 
>> But for most
>> situations, I think that the concern about the GC is way 
>> overblown.
>
> +1
>
> Some years ago, a colleague of mine moonlighted teaching 
> remedial algebra at the UW. She'd write on the board:
>
>    x + 2 = 5
>
> and call on a student to "solve for x". The student would 
> collapse in a stuttering heap of jelly, emitting sparks and 
> smoke like a Star Trek computer. She discovered that if she 
> wrote instead:
>
>    _ + 2 = 5
>
> and would ask the same student what goes in the blank spot, 
> he'd say "3" without hesitation.
>
> In other words, the student would only see the words "solve", 
> "x", and "algebra" which were a shortcut in his brain to "I 
> can't do this" and "gee math is hard." She found she was a far 
> more effective teacher by avoiding using those words.
>
> I realized the same thing was happening with the word 
> "template". I talked Andrei into avoiding all use of that word 
> in "The D Programming Language", figuring that we could get 
> people who were terrified of "templates" to use them 
> successfully without realizing it (and I think this was very 
> successful).
>
> We have a similar problem with "GC". People hear that word, and 
> they are instantly turned off. No amount of education will 
> change that. We simply have to find a better way to deal with 
> this issue.

You remind me of a well-known Chinese fable.

At the time when Fan, a nobleman of the state of Jin, became a 
fugitive, a commoner found a bell and wanted to carry it off on 
his back. But the bell was too big for him. When he tried to 
knock it into pieces with a hammer there was a loud clanging 
sound. He was afraid that someone will hear the noise and take 
the bell from him, so he immediately stopped his own ears.
To worry about other people hearing the noise is understandable, 
but to worry about himself hearing the noise (as if stopping his 
own ears would prevent other people from hearing) is absurd.