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> From a broader perspective, pretty much any language with a gc ends up having a perpetual conversation around how the next gc will solve the problems with the

> From a broader perspective, pretty much any language with a gc ends up having a perpetual conversation around how the next gc will solve the problems with the current gc. You can see it in java, go, julia, and D. Do you have any references handy on the julia bit there? I actually have seen very little conversation in the julia community about replacing or upgrading the GC. Mostly just the ocassional post from an inexperienced user who thinks that a borrow checker would be a good fit for julia. Discussion seems to almost always revolve around showing users who need it, how to manually manage memory when necessary by pre-allocating arrays, using in-place operations or writing stack allocated code so that they avoid the GC in performance critical code. I've never seriously used a language without a GC, but my feeling in Julia has always been that I never really had gripes about the GC because it's so easy to avoid the GC and take memory management into my own hands.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
There were plenty of discussions a few years ago. Julia is probably used the least out of those languages for things that might have latency problems though - servers, guis, games, etc.
- eigenspace 6y ago
  Interesting, in the three years I've been around I've seen little discussion of it. The main people I was aware of who cared about low-latency were robotics people and they mostly found that the techniques for manually managing memory allowed them to avoid the GC and get the latency they needed quite easily. One complaint I will say I've heard though is that while these people find they can get the allocation behavior they want (i.e. none), some of them would like semantic guarentees that they will not hit allocations, rather than needing to test and make sure their code doesn't start hitting the GC if they switch Julia versions. Someday we might be able to provide such guarantees, but for now GC behavior is just an implementation detail that can change across minor versions. I can sympathize with those who find that uncomfortable for sure, but in practice, Julia versions have been consistently better at getting more automatic stack allocations, not less, so it hasn't really been a problem.

CyberDildonics 6y ago

There were plenty of discussions a few years ago. Julia is probably used the least out of those languages for things that might have latency problems though - servers, guis, games, etc.

eigenspace 6y ago
Interesting, in the three years I've been around I've seen little discussion of it. The main people I was aware of who cared about low-latency were robotics people and they mostly found that the techniques for manually managing memory allowed them to avoid the GC and get the latency they needed quite easily. One complaint I will say I've heard though is that while these people find they can get the allocation behavior they want (i.e. none), some of them would like semantic guarentees that they will not hit allocations, rather than needing to test and make sure their code doesn't start hitting the GC if they switch Julia versions. Someday we might be able to provide such guarantees, but for now GC behavior is just an implementation detail that can change across minor versions. I can sympathize with those who find that uncomfortable for sure, but in practice, Julia versions have been consistently better at getting more automatic stack allocations, not less, so it hasn't really been a problem.