| ▲ | jerf 4 hours ago |
| Because about 99% of the time the garbage collect is a negligible portion of your runtime at the benefit of a huge dollop of safety. People really need to stop acting like a garbage collector is some sort of cosmic horror that automatically takes you back to 1980s performance or something. The cases where they are unsuitable are a minority, and a rather small one at that. If you happen to live in that minority, great, but it'd be helpful if those of you in that minority would speak as if you are in the small minority and not propagate the crazy idea that garbage collection comes with massive "performance penalties" unconditionally. They come with conditions, and rather tight conditions nowadays. |
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| ▲ | hypeatei 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think these threads attract people that write code for performance-critical use cases which explains the "cosmic horror" over pretty benign things. I agree though: most programs aren't going to be brought to their knees over some GC sweeps every so often. |
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| ▲ | KerrAvon 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Outside of hobbyist things, performance-critical code is the only responsible use case for a non-memory safe language like C in 2025, so of course it does. (Even that window is rapidly closing, though; languages like Rust and Swift can be better than C for perf-critical things because of the immutability guarantees.) |
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| ▲ | Phil_Latio 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Because about 99% of the time the garbage collect is a negligible portion of your runtime In a system programming language? |
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| ▲ | jerf an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Whether or not GC is a negligible portion of your runtime is a characteristic of your program, not your implementation language. For 99% of programs, probably more, yes. I have been working in GC languages for the last 25 years. The GC has been a performance problem for me... once. The modal experience for developers is probably zero. Once or twice is not that uncommon. But you shouldn't bend your entire implementation stack choice over "once or twice a career" outcomes. This is not the only experience for developers, and there are those whose careers are concentrated in the places where it matters... databases, 100%-utilization network code, hardware drivers. But for 99% of the programs out there, whatever language they are implemented in, GC is not an important performance consideration. For the vast bulk of those programs, there is a much larger performance consideration in it that could be turned up in 5 minutes with a profiler and nobody has even bothered to do that and squeeze out the accidentally quadratic code because even that doesn't matter to them, let alone GC delays. This is the "system programmer's" equivalent of the web dev's "I need a web framework that can push 2,000,000 requests per second" and then choosing the framework that can push 2,001,000 rps over the one that can push 2,000,000 because fast... when the code they are actually writing for the work they are actually doing can barely push 100 rps. Even game engines nowadays have rather quite a lot of GC in them. Even in a system programming language, and even in a program that is going to experience a great deal of load, you are going to have to budget some non-trivial optimization time to your own code before GC is your biggest problem, because the odds that you wrote something slower than the GC without realizing it is pretty high. | |
| ▲ | Snarwin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's plenty of application-level C and C++ code out there that isn't performance-critical, and would benefit from the safety a garbage collector provides. | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, plenty have been done already so since Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Cedar, Oberon, Sing#, Modula-2+, Modula-3, D, Swift,.... It is a matter to have an open mindset. Eventually system languages with manual memory management will be done history in agentic driven OSes. | | |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | 762236 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| For new projects, I just use Rust: there is zero reason to deal with a garbage collector today. If I'm in C, it's because I care about predictable performance, and why I'm not using Java for that particular project. |
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