4 ms·

I also have no idea how to properly do memory management, every language I've worked with has had garbage collection. I know the languages I write in use malloc

I also have no idea how to properly do memory management, every language I've worked with has had garbage collection. I know the languages I write in use malloc or something to get more memory, but that's it. Never called it, don't know how it works. For flabberg-ammo for that gasty feeling.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I can understand how this situation happens, but honestly it really bothers me that it is the case. I see all this bloated slow software everywhere that pauses all the time and it is hard not to see "I've never done memory management" as part of the cause.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  That might not be due to memory management - a lot of my work is in Go and Java, selling very high demand inventory to millions of people (opening night movie tickets across tens of thousands of screens and shows across the entire country) and the APIs are not slow and do not (noticeably) GC pause. But both Go and Java / JVM allow people to do high-value work without worrying about memory management (other than leaks of course). No allocations, free / release, no pointer arithmetic. Even the concept of pointers in Go isn't actual memory addresses but value/reference semantics. The only time I came close to having to manage memory was iOS apps, but then ObjectiveC added ARC and Swift came along, so nope.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    It certainly feels like a GC pause, but it could be a lot of things. Regardless of the cause I feel like the fact that people don't think about how memory is managed is indicative of the real problem: people are programming computers without really understanding how they work. And while that is fine, even encouraged, for a lot of use cases I think anyone calling themselves a professional programmer should be held to a higher standard.
    - sudhirj 5y ago
      So how many levels or layers down or up should we expect someone to go? Say we take Go / Java as a starting point, L-1 would be C / C++, L-2 would be Assembly / SIMD / AVX processor instructions, L-3 would be chip design / architecture, L-4 would be diode chemistry and fabrication, L-5 is quantum mechanics? And on the other side L+1 would be databases, L+2 would be system architecture / systems design, L+3 would be user experience and communication, L+4 organisation and team design, L+5 would be LISP? How many levels would someone have to straddle to meet the higher standard? And does it matter which level their midpoint is?
    - foobarian 5y ago
      I too despair when I remember the days of software instantly responding to keypresses. But I fear that no matter how much today's developers knew about computer architecture software would still be slow, because latency is like a gas: it expands to take up all available latency-toleration space in a program's audience. Compressing it back is expensive, ergo it's a race to the bottom where business leadership would not let those developers actually take the time to make software more responsive.
- kamaal 5y ago
  >>I see all this bloated slow software everywhere that pauses all the time and it is hard not to see "I've never done memory management" as part of the cause. There's no way your ordinary programmer would have done memory management better than the GC options available with something like the JVM. This is in fact Java/Python/Perl exist in the first place. Slow software is better than software that crashes often.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I can understand how this situation happens, but honestly it really bothers me that it is the case. I see all this bloated slow software everywhere that pauses all the time and it is hard not to see "I've never done memory management" as part of the cause.

sudhirj 5y ago
That might not be due to memory management - a lot of my work is in Go and Java, selling very high demand inventory to millions of people (opening night movie tickets across tens of thousands of screens and shows across the entire country) and the APIs are not slow and do not (noticeably) GC pause. But both Go and Java / JVM allow people to do high-value work without worrying about memory management (other than leaks of course). No allocations, free / release, no pointer arithmetic. Even the concept of pointers in Go isn't actual memory addresses but value/reference semantics. The only time I came close to having to manage memory was iOS apps, but then ObjectiveC added ARC and Swift came along, so nope.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  It certainly feels like a GC pause, but it could be a lot of things. Regardless of the cause I feel like the fact that people don't think about how memory is managed is indicative of the real problem: people are programming computers without really understanding how they work. And while that is fine, even encouraged, for a lot of use cases I think anyone calling themselves a professional programmer should be held to a higher standard.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    So how many levels or layers down or up should we expect someone to go? Say we take Go / Java as a starting point, L-1 would be C / C++, L-2 would be Assembly / SIMD / AVX processor instructions, L-3 would be chip design / architecture, L-4 would be diode chemistry and fabrication, L-5 is quantum mechanics? And on the other side L+1 would be databases, L+2 would be system architecture / systems design, L+3 would be user experience and communication, L+4 organisation and team design, L+5 would be LISP? How many levels would someone have to straddle to meet the higher standard? And does it matter which level their midpoint is?
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I too despair when I remember the days of software instantly responding to keypresses. But I fear that no matter how much today's developers knew about computer architecture software would still be slow, because latency is like a gas: it expands to take up all available latency-toleration space in a program's audience. Compressing it back is expensive, ergo it's a race to the bottom where business leadership would not let those developers actually take the time to make software more responsive.
kamaal 5y ago
>>I see all this bloated slow software everywhere that pauses all the time and it is hard not to see "I've never done memory management" as part of the cause. There's no way your ordinary programmer would have done memory management better than the GC options available with something like the JVM. This is in fact Java/Python/Perl exist in the first place. Slow software is better than software that crashes often.