Nice 10 year old rant :-)
JWZ, on Garbage Collection
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#12Perhaps slightly off topic and probably not worth its own submission, but anyone visiting this thread might be interested to know about the cool things in store for us with the next generation of garbage collectors:
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#13Is it just me or does every GC is faster argument boil down to: "All working real world examples are noticeably slower, but trust me, I know of this amazing GC that's actually faster it's just not in production use anywhere yet."
That hasn't been my experience at all. The JVM garbage collector kicks ass today, right now in real applications all over the world, and the next one is going to be even better. There is very likely a class of application out there where extreme micro-optimization is still a good tradeoff (Google's search maybe?), but anyone arguing that they really need to write it in C and do their own memory management carries the burden of proof these days, not the other way around.
In fact many would argue that for small, short-lived objects that the Sun GC outperforms malloc/free. This is a topic of debate, obviously.
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#14I agree with the points expressed on this article. Fully. But "I claim", "I claim", ..., will not convince a lot of people. Ah and... unfortunately after 10 years the situation is still the same, we are still writing malloc/free and no standard, high quality, widely accepted GC for C/C++ is here. At least now valgrind is able to remove most of the leaks without too much efforts compared to 10 years ago.
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#15I agree with the points expressed on this article. Fully. But "I claim", "I claim", ..., will not convince a lot of people. Ah and... unfortunately after 10 years the situation is still the same, we are still writing malloc/free and no standard, high quality, widely accepted GC for C/C++ is here. At least now valgrind is able to remove most of the leaks without too much efforts compared to 10 years ago.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but C's and C++'s lack of a memory model is really a barrier (ahem) to GC development.
It's amazing that the BDW GC works as well as it does. I hack on Guile, and we're actually switching to use it.
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#16Is it just me or does every GC is faster argument boil down to: "All working real world examples are noticeably slower, but trust me, I know of this amazing GC that's actually faster it's just not in production use anywhere yet."
That hasn't been my experience at all. The JVM garbage collector kicks ass today, right now in real applications all over the world, and the next one is going to be even better. There is very likely a class of application out there where extreme micro-optimization is still a good tradeoff (Google's search maybe?), but anyone arguing that they really need to write it in C and do their own memory management carries the…
Operating systems, drivers and small embeded systems. I'm sure there are a few others. These also happen to be C's problem domain in the modern era.
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#17Is it just me or does every GC is faster argument boil down to: "All working real world examples are noticeably slower, but trust me, I know of this amazing GC that's actually faster it's just not in production use anywhere yet."
Only that the amazing GC JWZ states as examples (Smalltalk, Lisp) are used in production ourdays.
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#18What separates good thinking/writing from a mediocre noise is that it remains relevant and interesting to read even in 10 years, despite missing rounded corners and lack of randomly chosen photos that are supposed to help us to understand his point.
Everything JWZ writes, even the rants, have a builtin life-support and relevance of at least 10 years.
Maybe I'm just too involved with the community, but Lispers tend to make some of the greatest rants, aphorisms, epigrams and one-liners out of any other hacker group I know, even when they're downright hostile :-)
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#19Double meaning is the guy who picks up the litter in his nightclub.
When you spent your precious youth creating XEmacs, mozilla, and netscape navigator, you're sure as hell allowed to have a pet nightclub; can you think of a better way to hack the popularity problem than to own a kickass music venue for hipsters?
Don't hate the playa, hate the game! ;-)
Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection
#20Double meaning is the guy who picks up the litter in his nightclub.
When you spent your precious youth creating XEmacs, mozilla, and netscape navigator, you're sure as hell allowed to have a pet nightclub; can you think of a better way to hack the popularity problem than to own a kickass music venue for hipsters? Don't hate the playa, hate the game! ;-)
I didn't think his comment was negative. It seems weird that it's downvoted. However, since you mentioned it...
DNA is a weird spot. It's a great space. JWZ obviously tried to recreate a subculture that was never hugely popular but sort of maybe had its heyday and died in the 90s. The sort of only-in-SF cyber-industrial-goth thing. Front242, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire remixes. Every guy looks like Robert Smith with a top hat, wearable computer, and zombie boots. Proto-burning-man meets blade runner sort of thing.
It's definitely not a favorite for hipsters. It only comes close on mashup night, and even those "hipsters" are all 38 years old. The whole hipster in SF thing is bit of a hoax. All those hipsters are really web designers who went to Stanford, which wasn't really hip ever, but certainly hasn't been hip since 1999. What is now known as hipster in SF was called "yuppie" 20 years ago. It's just different brands of shoes and alcohol - even the tight pants remain the same.