A betterC base

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, February 10, 2018 14:06:09 Timon Gehr via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 08.02.2018 16:55, JN wrote:
> > On Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 14:54:19 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> >> Garbage collection has proved to be a smashing success in the
> >> industry, providing productivity and memory-safety to programmers of
> >> all skill levels.
> >
> > Citation needed on how garbage collection has been a smashing success
> > based on its merits rather than the merits of the languages that use
> > garbage collection. Python was also a smashing success, but it doesn't
> > use a garbage collector in it's default implementation (CPython). Unless
> > you mean garbage collection as in "not manual memory management"? ...
>
> Even if "garbage collection" is taken to mean "collecting garbage",
> reference counting is garbage collection. Referring to RC as not GC
> makes no sense at all and was probably only invented because some people
> want to think that RC is good but GC is bad, being too lazy to say
> "tracing GC".

Except that RC and what folks typically mean what they talk about GC are
fundamentally different. Yes, they both automatically free memory for you,
but one is deterministic, whereas the other involves periodically running a
collection to find memory that can be freed. So, yes, in a sense, RC is a
form of GC, but they're very different beasts.

- Jonathan M Davis