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Comment by rcgorton | Hacker News Reader

Let me understand: introduce an increasingly complex 'solution' to the symptoms rather than fixing the root cause: dynamic garbage collection is, by its name and nature GARBAGE.

This strikes me as a strong motivation to stop using 'transparent' garbage collection as seen in so many dynamic languages. IT DOES NOT WORK. Period. Get over yourselves.

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Well that seems like an easily applied solution to the problem of GC in javascript.

As a follow up, what do you suggest should be used instead?

Explicit life time management? refcounting? ownership models?

They all have problems (although the exact problems change) and/or require substantially different programming models.

Personally, I'm a fan of explicit lifetime management, such as RAII in C++ and especially in Rust. It solves the general problem of resource management, as opposed to only memory management. Most languages that use garbage collection leave generalized resource management in a C like state of malloc and free. A few (not JS) have syntax for binding the lifetime of an object to a scope, such as "with" in Python or "using" in C#, but the burden is still on the consumer of an interface to know that they need to use it (you need to know that object must be .close()d, or .unlock()ed, etc.) and you need to remember at each and every call site; programmers make errors.

That said, changing from GC to explicit lifetime management requires wide-reaching language changes that I don't see how you would apply to JavaScript, or nearly any GC language. It's a very fundamental aspect of the language, and not easily changed. Hence the work into better collectors by the languages that do GC, so the parent's comment is not really enlightening.

I know the root's comment wasn't actually useful. People who have decided they hate GC like this will always do so. Much like vim/emacs :D

It was more a question of whether the commenter had any better solutions to propose. I was /really/ trying not to just be a dick and say "cool, so you work out how to do that without changing the language at all".

I mean, it very evidently does work, given the popularity of JavaScript and other GC'd languages…

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