3 ms·

You seem to have an axe to grind. Performance isn’t black and white. Optimizing your memory usage isn’t going to do you a whit of good if you’re constrained by

You seem to have an axe to grind. Performance isn’t black and white. Optimizing your memory usage isn’t going to do you a whit of good if you’re constrained by your database queries. Optimizing your DB queries isn’t going to do you any good if you’re constrained by a chatty microservice architecture. Optimizing your UI response time isn’t going to do you any good if you’re already below the threshold of perceived speed. Etc. GC performance on short-lived objects is quite good in enough situations to matter, such that optimizing for it, rather than your application architecture, is likely foolish outside of performance sensitive loops. Time is always limited. Spending your optimization budget on micro-optimizations is short-sighted.

ncmncm 5y ago
Meaningless personal criticisms undermine your argument. Performance problems usually appear in places we prefer they would not, often runtime apparatus we poorly control such as GC. It is always preferable to try to ignore and discount those, as they may be arbitrarily hard to fix, so people do. Yet, actually not depending on such apparatus, where it is the problem, gets you free optimization. Performance doesn't care where it is found or lost. Micro-optimization is foundational; fail there, and there is often little else you can usefully do. The best optimizations are not doing the thing at all. GC is always strictly worse than no memory management. Fixing your chatty microservoices and your under- or over-indexed DB queries may do you no good if you have built in bottlenecks of your own. "Quite good" means nothing except in comparison to something else.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I want a world without garbage collection. I don't think we can achieve a world without garbage collection while there are codebases based around aliased pointers (which makes lifetime reasoning difficult, and causes enough use-after-frees to make the Linux desktop apps I use unstable, unless you use refcounting) and circular references (which is difficult to refcount). Maybe I'll wait for Rust programmers to rewrite software around tree-based ownership (restrictive but immune to these problems) and ECS/arena indexes (can use-after-free but won't segfault). In the time being, while "spiderweb object graphs" are commonplace, perhaps Nim's memory management (https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html) can give us "non-GC by default, refcounting or GC when necessary". I want it to succeed. I hope it does.

ncmncm 5y ago

Meaningless personal criticisms undermine your argument. Performance problems usually appear in places we prefer they would not, often runtime apparatus we poorly control such as GC. It is always preferable to try to ignore and discount those, as they may be arbitrarily hard to fix, so people do. Yet, actually not depending on such apparatus, where it is the problem, gets you free optimization. Performance doesn't care where it is found or lost. Micro-optimization is foundational; fail there, and there is often little else you can usefully do. The best optimizations are not doing the thing at all. GC is always strictly worse than no memory management. Fixing your chatty microservoices and your under- or over-indexed DB queries may do you no good if you have built in bottlenecks of your own. "Quite good" means nothing except in comparison to something else.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
I want a world without garbage collection. I don't think we can achieve a world without garbage collection while there are codebases based around aliased pointers (which makes lifetime reasoning difficult, and causes enough use-after-frees to make the Linux desktop apps I use unstable, unless you use refcounting) and circular references (which is difficult to refcount). Maybe I'll wait for Rust programmers to rewrite software around tree-based ownership (restrictive but immune to these problems) and ECS/arena indexes (can use-after-free but won't segfault). In the time being, while "spiderweb object graphs" are commonplace, perhaps Nim's memory management (https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html) can give us "non-GC by default, refcounting or GC when necessary". I want it to succeed. I hope it does.