Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#2Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM.
I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-source pauseless miracles GCs right there before our eyes, yet it's the trendy thing in language design to foist memory management on users.
You don't even have to use a big VM if you want good GC. Go use MPS. Lots of options out there, even if you want to implement your own VM.
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#3Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM. I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-so…
> We have multiple open-source pauseleses miracles right there before our eyes
Is this meaningfully true in a practical sense? I've been writing code with soft real-time requirements and I don't think your notion of "pauseless" suffices. And if these miracles are open-source and right before our eyes, why do languages like Crystal and D still use Boehm?
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#4Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM. I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-so…
> We have multiple open-source pauseless miracles GCs right there in front of us
Can you share some links/references?
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#5Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM. I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-so…
> We have multiple open-source pauseleses miracles right there before our eyes Is this meaningfully true in a practical sense? I've been writing code with soft real-time requirements and I don't think your notion of "pauseless" suffices. And if these miracles are open-source and right before our eyes, why do languages like Crystal and D still use Boehm?
The charitable explanation is the authors lack the time to rebase onto something more modern.
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#6Sorry but the name means bitterkid in french, I can't get over it :D
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#7There was once a time when I'd see a page like this and think "wow, must be a great project with such a polished website".
Now, it's just a neutral or perhaps even very slightly negative signal (especially the em-dash in the very first line of the page).
Anyone able to tell me if this is a project actually worth paying attention to, or just another raindrop in the current monsoon of slop?
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#8Gossamer has a cycle collector and eager reference counting. Good luck dropping the last reference to a 10,000-node graph, especially if cyclic. That means it doesn't have "pause free" memory. If you want pause freedom, go use ZGC or another modern GC on a modern VM. I just can't take seriously this spate of languages that ignore the past 30 years of research into automatic memory management. We have multiple open-so…
> We have multiple open-source pauseless miracles GCs right there in front of us Can you share some links/references?
ZGC is extremely good work.
https://wiki.openjdk.org/spaces/zgc/pages/34668579/Main
> ZGC performs all expensive work concurrently, without stopping the execution of application threads for more than a millisecond. It is suitable for applications which require low latency. Pause times are independent of the heap size that is being used. ZGC works well with heap sizes from a few hundred megabytes to 16TB.
Go's GC is also very good: https://go.dev/blog/greenteagc.
V8's Orinoco is also pretty good now. It's improved a lot over the past decade and is now mostly-parallel. (A decade is about how long one of these things takes: high-performance GC is hard.)
I'm also a fan of MPS: it's a big of dark horse because it's more a GC construction kit than a ready-to-go GC, but it's fast and flexible, and I'd start with it any day over Boehm if I were making a VM from scratch.
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#9[flagged]
Re: Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have multiple open-source pauseleses miracles right there before our eyes Is this meaningfully true in a practical sense? I've been writing code with soft real-time requirements and I don't think your notion of "pauseless" suffices. And if these miracles are open-source and right before our eyes, why do languages like Crystal and D still use Boehm?
The charitable explanation is the authors lack the time to rebase onto something more modern.
You seem to have a very low opinion of other people. If these miraculous collectors are so generally applicable, why are very smart people putting effort into things like Perseus?