Quote from Shotglass :

i wouldnt dare to actually try it but i rather suspect that gc would cause complete chaos with the scientific software i use and occasionally write which can fill up several gigs of ram with useful data in no time

*shrug* If you have data that has no object handle or var pointing to it, then a GC will free that memory. If you've nothing pointing at it, are you still using it? Your dismissal of GC out of hand is hardly scientific... ;P Though sure you're doing fine without it so why use it, but I dont see what point you are trying to make. On the other hand, maybe you wouldnt need so much RAM if you cleaned the memory up ;P

It's horses for courses though. I've improved as a programmer massively over the years, and i've been programming a lot of years, so I like to think i'm reasonably good these days. I do tend to do things my own way though, even now my boss dispairs - as I switch between delivering masterpieces and absolute junk each week. What works for me might not work for another programmer and vice versa, like at work I have to use spaces instead of tabs - if anyone ever dared infected one of my own personal source documents with an indentation comprised of spaces I would invent new and painful ways to hurt them, which may or may not involve a trip to the large hedron collider.

There are many huge systems that run on VRMs and use GC and have no bloat or performance problems whatsoever. Heck, Google are happy to say that Python is the glue that holds most of their infrastructure together. If you think Google is slow then you have problems . If a program is well-written, clean and efficient, it doesn't matter whether it is written in C++ or Javascript, it will still be a well-written, clean and efficient program. For me personally, anything that lets me worry less about language implementation, and lets me worry more about how much my code sucks, is a good thing. And it makes me a better programmer.

Quote from Becky Rose :

@Wien: I think we are thinking of different concepts. Personally I dont consider closing a resource to be part of garbage collection.

Well they are exactly the same thing when you get down to it. Allocating and releasing resources. Memory is just one of many a normal program will have to handle.

GCs bother me because they only handle the memory part. Also, because they usually do delayed collection when handling memory, you don't get deterministic destruction either (PHP5 is the only exception I can think of, but that has it's own fun problems). All this means that for any resource, other than memory, you have to manage cleanup manualy and this is a huge problem when you take things like exception safety into consideration.

The slight convenience of not having to clean up heap-allocated memory (which C++ can handle just fine through smart pointers or similar), is just not worth it in my mind. I want deterministic destruction dammit.

I DarkTimes

Quote from Becky Rose :

*shrug* If you have data that has no object handle or var pointing to it, then a GC will free that memory. If you've nothing pointing at it, are you still using it?

im not sure i follow where this is comming from

Quote :

Though sure you're doing fine without it so why use it, but I dont see what point you are trying to make.

imagine youre solving some physical problem with both time and space fractured into bite size chunks (fem)
in that case youll always be dealing with a current and a next state and some function which turns the current into the next
with a large enough problem where each state has several gigs worth of data and additional data stored to get some useful information out of the progression of states, i think youll see where this might cause problems if you dont clear ram used by old states immediatelly
although its probably a bit of an unrealistic case and shuffling data between two preallocated address spaces for 2 states instead of allocating whole new states all the time is more efficient

Quote from DarkTimes :

it doesn't matter whether it is written in C++ or Javascript, it will still be a well-written, clean and efficient program.

Well you have to admit that the ease in which the language lets you achieve a "well-written, clean and efficient program" should be one consideration when choosing the implementation laguage? They're not all the same in that respect.

For some tasks Python, Java, C# etc. may be perfectly good and as such the best choice (their standard libraries provide a lot of good stuff you don't have to write yourself), but I still don't see the benefit a GC specifically provides me in these languages. For me it fixes a problem I've never had, and does so by introducing a whole new class of problems I have to be careful to take into consideration. That's not a tradeoff I'm willing to make in many cases.