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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

> I'm sure _someone_ thinks manual memory management is a feature rather than a bug,

I reckon mandatory manual memory management is not ideal. But the ability to manage some memory manually, including in cases that require something more flexible than a stack, is definitely a feature.

I believe every willing user of Zig, Odin, and Rust would agree with me on this one.

> […] with some care […] you can avoid allocating at all […]

As long as it’s crystal clear from the source code, or I have a tool that tells me which line of mine is responsible for the allocation.

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> As long as it’s crystal clear from the source code, or I have a tool that tells me which line of mine is responsible for the allocation.

The tool is the escape analyzer, but I don’t think anyone has made it ergonomic yet.

Then it needs to be made standard. Without that, or an equivalent solution, garbage collected languages will remain unusable in constrained environments.

I'm not sure I agree (or maybe I misunderstand--I assume you're saying "the tool needs to be standard"?), but people use non-standard tools in C all the time. Every build tool or package management solution in C is non-standard. Every memory analyzer or static analysis solution is non-standard.

I think the real impediment isn't related to garbage collection, but it's just ecosystem inertia and industry knowledge inertia--the same forces that inhibit Rust adoption or C++ adoption or Ada adoption. Does that seem reasonable, or am I misunderstanding? What do you think?

I mean it needs to be made standard because of how bloody useful that is. More people need to be made aware (industry knowledge inertia), and it needs to be usable pretty much everywhere (ecosystem inertia).

C and C++ start out so unsafe, I can hardly use them on substantial projects without sanitisers now. Sanitisers need to be made standard so I can use them everywhere.

Garbage collected languages start out with unpredictable memory usage, making them unusable on constrained environments without the relevant memory analysers (static or dynamic). Such tools need to be made standard so garbage collection may be an option on more platforms.

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