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He says that garbage collection makes languages more scalable and lack of it makes them less scalable. That flies in the face of reality. In practice garbage co
by TwoBit 17y ago
He says that garbage collection makes languages more scalable and lack of it makes them less scalable. That flies in the face of reality. In practice garbage collection bogs down huge applications. Microsoft tried to rewrite major portions of Windows with GC and it was a dog and they killed it. It seems that most of the biggest applications and systems use a classic memory management scheme, directly or indirectly.
"An experiment is worth a thousand opinions."
- gaius 17y agoHe's talking about the cognitive overhead of programming in the large, not the computational overhead. I'm into OCaml but I think he's wrong to recommend it so highly in this specific niche - OCaml's namespacing mechanism is weak compared to C++ and Java's for example. Probably the most serious commercial users of OCaml are Jane Street Capital, and their Yaron Minsky has complained about this.