3 ms·

GCs don't magically allow you to not move things around. You still need to grow arrays and hashmaps. GCs also don't magically provide data race guarantes, which

• LessDmesg 7y ago
  My point was the opposite: if data is to be copied about anyway, why not use GC which makes this copying safe (i.e. it handles reference updates) and extracts additional profits (compactization) while it's at it? As opposed to manual languages where objects are expected to be pinned (and memory-fragmenting) but often aren't, leading to headaches or runtime errors.
  • winstonewert 7y ago
    Do any languages actually do this? Do any languages somehow use their GC to update references when a growable array is reallocated? I'm not aware of any language that does. Furthermore, its hard to see how it could. In the case of a simple copying/compacting collector the whole world is stopped and the pointer graph traced. But you obviously can't do that every time a growable array needs to be reallocated. I understand that there are more complex solutions that avoid that pause, but still not any I'm aware of that would be exploitable for reallocating an array.