Just out of interest for people not familiar with C, latest goings on there etc, what's the usecase where you'd want a garbage collector in C? My (very surface level) understanding was always the trade off for the increased manual effort of using C - manual memory management being one example - was that you could tailor your solution exactly to your usecase for increased performance / lower resource use. If you're go…
Think about it the other way around — Java, Python, JavaScript all have garbage collectors. What language are those GCs written in? How does the runtime keep track of the objects in those languages, and how is the lifecycle for that tracking managed? "Writing a GC in C" (or equivalent language) is not so much a strange thing as it is an inevitability.
Re: Show HN: A simple garbage collector for C
#61Some gcs are indeed written in C, often due to convenience of tooling. But Java's zgc is written in Java. Pypy's gc is written in Python. Go's gc is written in Go.