6 Feb
2022
6 Feb
'22
3:15 p.m.
Let's keep it civil and non-personal, I don't think Rob was pointing
at anyone, I think he was pointing at some not so forward thinking.
I have to side with Rob on this one, even though I'm squarely in the
I like C best camp.
While I _can_ do all the malloc/free stuff myself (and have decades of
working code to prove it), it's become harder and harder to find other
people who can. Younger programmers just sort of stare at you with a
"I have to do what?" look. They think you are a dinosaur for working
like that when other reasonable languages do that work for you.
When I did little-lang.org, granted, not widely used but we used it a
lot, it did all the memory management behind the scenes, used reference
counting so you never had the big GC sweep that some languages used,
worked great. And super pleasant to not have to do all that memory
management.
Having the languages do more for you, and put up guard rails so people
can't make stupid mistakes, seems to be the way of the future. It's
not my future, I love C, it does what I want and I can live with what
it needs me to do to have working code. But I'm a dinosaur and I
know it. I'm not trying to push C where people don't want it.
On Sun, Feb 06, 2022 at 06:14:36AM -0700, Ed Carp wrote:
Since you made this personal and called me out
specifically, I will respond:
"In what way is automatic memory management harder, more unsafe, and
less robust than hand-written memory management using malloc and
free?"
Because there's no difference in the two. Someone had to write the
"automatic memory management", right?
"You seem to think that garbage collection only exists in languages
that have a smell you don't like."
I said nothing of the kind. You've got me mixed up with someone else.
Just because I respond to a thread doesn't mean I agree with
everything said in the thread.
"Using malloc and free might be a badge of honor to some, but it's
also a failure of automation."
Again, the automation code has to written by *someone*. It doesn't
just appear by itself.
"This discussion should probably go to COFF, or perhaps I should just
leave the list. I am starting to feel uncomfortable here. Too much
swagger."
I read through the thread. Just because people don't agree with each
other doesn't equate to "swagger". I've seen little evidence of
anything other than reasoned analysis and rational, respectful
discussion. Was there any sort of personal attacks that I missed?
The fact of the matter is, code written with malloc/free, if written
carefully, will run for *years*. There are Linux boxes that have been
running for literally years without being rebooted, and mainframes and
miniframes that get booted only when a piece of hardware fails.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm