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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to next few years when we can finally abstract away all the back-end techs.

We ain't even solved garbage collection yet, and you think "back end systems" are going to abstracted away in the next few years?

> We ain't even solved garbage collection yet

Can you elaborate on that?

People still write in languages that force you to manage your own memory.

Once performance starts to matter (either due to scale or time requirements) abstractions always have tradeoffs you can't accept.

So then, how can garbage collection ever be solved if it’s a trade-off

And how can backends be abstracted away if there is a trade off?

As long as compute is a meaningful percentage of spend, the trade off will matter.

Right. So what does it look like for garbage collection to be solved? You’re saying it’s not ever possible

I am saying it's not possible for the foreseeable future, yes. The same way backends becoming an abstraction most developers don't need to worry about is also not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Maybe they just mean for the type of projects they care about

Can't you already just use FaaS and managed persistence?

We've had this for at least a decade now.

If you use a cloud provider there are managed solutions for data engineering pipelines.

We did? That’s news to me.

Sure, and it's not cheap.

AI isn't going to be any cheaper

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