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The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they beco

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

Raed667 5y ago
The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Garbage-collection-as-a-service would get a ton of venture capital though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    Oh wow, AR/VR mark/sweep applications! Those VR rooms get messy, who is going to clean them up?
  - gosukiwi 5y ago
    Hahaha cloud-based garbage collection. Made me giggle.
  - ransom1538 5y ago
    At patent office right now with this. My attorney said will go through the USPO like butter.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    There are a ton of a companies that help you track cloud spend, while some of it is architectural, most is really about waste, old ec2 image backups, s3 with no lifecycle policies ... garbage
- geofft 5y ago
  There's two things happening in this post: 1. Development environments are running on Kubernetes, and VS Code is remoting into them. You don't have to pay a monthly subscription for that. VS Code remoting is free-as-in-beer and Kubernetes is free-as-in-speech. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/azure/kubernetes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/azure/kubernetes 2. The actual Kubernetes hosting is the product "GitHub Codespaces" running on Azure. GitHub certainly isn't paying a monthly fee to themselves for this; they are, technically, self-hosting it. I agree that you probably do want to have the option to run it yourself, but I think you do, given 1.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    Microsoft probably does internal billing here, right?
    - geofft 5y ago
      I mean, probably for the actual Azure usage, but that's not different from billing yourself for development VMs or Mac laptops or whatever (i.e., they'd be doing that independent of this approach). I assume the Codespaces team is getting plenty of value out of GitHub dogfooding the product and doesn't need to bill themselves for its use.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The garbage collector should pay _me_ to use it.
- syshum 5y ago
  I bet somewhere you just gave a Lang Developer a monetization idea... This will be coming to a cloud service near you
- kps 5y ago
  > The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector. In some cities you do, and they're often controlled by organized crime. (Whether this comment is a metaphor for SaaS is left as an exercise for the reader.)
- blibble 5y ago
  have you heard of Azul Zing? (not entirely serious, but it has a very expensive monthly fee for what is in essence a better GC algorithm)
- yunohn 5y ago
  This is already a thing, if you look at Java (old-school ik), Oracle vs OpenJDK [1]. I don’t see why that would be a problem though? If I can pay a company to provide improved GC for my infra, where the cost savings made it beneficial, I would do it… [1] https://superuser.com/a/1365224 https://superuser.com/a/1365224
msbarnett 5y ago
I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  What’s an example of a company collapsing in that way? I actually can’t think of any.
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    These tend to be early stage startups who went with BaaS to get around resource constraints and couldn't survive the rapid need to exfiltrate their data and build a backend with a gun to their head. Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree. Which is to say, you wouldn't have heard of them, because they never got big enough to be known to anyone beyond a handful of clients and employees. I've personally been hired to try to rescue such a company, and was not successful.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree. Larger companies have also been known to buy out critical service vendors and in-house them when there was a risk that they might otherwise shutdown or pivot, too; that's less often an option fot smaller firms.
    - MShawCN 5y ago
      Do you consider AWS Lambda and such to be BaaS? I'm pretty new to the field and have been focusing on AWS 'serverless' as the backend for most projects. Would you say this is bad practice overall?
      - 5y ago
carnitine 5y ago
The opening to the second paragraph honestly reads like satire of something that could have been said at any point in the last 50 years.
jhatemyjob 5y ago
You're totally right. Javascript and its ilk are clearly superior to the languages and tooling of the past. There's no doubt about that.
bakuninsbart 5y ago
I'd argue that it always held true to a certain extent. You don't necessarily need the underlying knowledge to be an efficient programmer in Python, but knowing C or Assembly certainly gives you an edge when it comes to, well, edge cases. And it isn't all about efficiency. Programming and CS is such a major part of my life, that I want to know the deeper parts, and I want others to understand it too. Programmers who do not seek that knowledge I unjustly judge for it.

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

Raed667 5y ago

The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector.

minimaxir 5y ago
Garbage-collection-as-a-service would get a ton of venture capital though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wyldfire 5y ago
  Oh wow, AR/VR mark/sweep applications! Those VR rooms get messy, who is going to clean them up?
- gosukiwi 5y ago
  Hahaha cloud-based garbage collection. Made me giggle.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  At patent office right now with this. My attorney said will go through the USPO like butter.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  There are a ton of a companies that help you track cloud spend, while some of it is architectural, most is really about waste, old ec2 image backups, s3 with no lifecycle policies ... garbage
geofft 5y ago
There's two things happening in this post: 1. Development environments are running on Kubernetes, and VS Code is remoting into them. You don't have to pay a monthly subscription for that. VS Code remoting is free-as-in-beer and Kubernetes is free-as-in-speech. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/azure/kubernetes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/azure/kubernetes 2. The actual Kubernetes hosting is the product "GitHub Codespaces" running on Azure. GitHub certainly isn't paying a monthly fee to themselves for this; they are, technically, self-hosting it. I agree that you probably do want to have the option to run it yourself, but I think you do, given 1.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  Microsoft probably does internal billing here, right?
  - geofft 5y ago
    I mean, probably for the actual Azure usage, but that's not different from billing yourself for development VMs or Mac laptops or whatever (i.e., they'd be doing that independent of this approach). I assume the Codespaces team is getting plenty of value out of GitHub dogfooding the product and doesn't need to bill themselves for its use.
dboreham 5y ago
The garbage collector should pay _me_ to use it.
syshum 5y ago
I bet somewhere you just gave a Lang Developer a monetization idea... This will be coming to a cloud service near you
kps 5y ago
> The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector. In some cities you do, and they're often controlled by organized crime. (Whether this comment is a metaphor for SaaS is left as an exercise for the reader.)
blibble 5y ago
have you heard of Azul Zing? (not entirely serious, but it has a very expensive monthly fee for what is in essence a better GC algorithm)
yunohn 5y ago
This is already a thing, if you look at Java (old-school ik), Oracle vs OpenJDK [1]. I don’t see why that would be a problem though? If I can pay a company to provide improved GC for my infra, where the cost savings made it beneficial, I would do it… [1] https://superuser.com/a/1365224 https://superuser.com/a/1365224

msbarnett 5y ago

I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.

spenczar5 5y ago
What’s an example of a company collapsing in that way? I actually can’t think of any.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  These tend to be early stage startups who went with BaaS to get around resource constraints and couldn't survive the rapid need to exfiltrate their data and build a backend with a gun to their head. Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree. Which is to say, you wouldn't have heard of them, because they never got big enough to be known to anyone beyond a handful of clients and employees. I've personally been hired to try to rescue such a company, and was not successful.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree. Larger companies have also been known to buy out critical service vendors and in-house them when there was a risk that they might otherwise shutdown or pivot, too; that's less often an option fot smaller firms.
  - MShawCN 5y ago
    Do you consider AWS Lambda and such to be BaaS? I'm pretty new to the field and have been focusing on AWS 'serverless' as the backend for most projects. Would you say this is bad practice overall?
    - 5y ago

carnitine 5y ago

The opening to the second paragraph honestly reads like satire of something that could have been said at any point in the last 50 years.

jhatemyjob 5y ago

You're totally right. Javascript and its ilk are clearly superior to the languages and tooling of the past. There's no doubt about that.

bakuninsbart 5y ago

I'd argue that it always held true to a certain extent. You don't necessarily need the underlying knowledge to be an efficient programmer in Python, but knowing C or Assembly certainly gives you an edge when it comes to, well, edge cases. And it isn't all about efficiency. Programming and CS is such a major part of my life, that I want to know the deeper parts, and I want others to understand it too. Programmers who do not seek that knowledge I unjustly judge for it.