2 Aug
2019
2 Aug
'19
7:03 a.m.
On 2 Aug 2019, at 09:43, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
Speaking of LISP and GC, it's impressive how GC
is not really a big issue any
more. At one point people were even building special CPUs that had hardware
support for GC; now it seems to be a 'solved problem' on ordinary CPUs.
I think it’s mostly a side effect of modern hardware speeds. For applications that care
about latency (and especially latency jitter) it’s still an issue.
For example, writing low latency trading software in Java requires some fairly silly
hoop-jumping to avoid triggering a collection pass.
These apps genuinely care about nanoseconds, but the tooling ecosystem and development
time advantages of Java seem to entice a decent number of people to embark on the
work-arounds.
In most areas though you’re absolutely right — it’s a non-issue now.
d