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Comment by fsck--off | Hacker News Reader

Nonsense. Most languages that include garbage collection allow you to turn it off; the same languages also allow you to explicitly control memory.

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>Nonsense. Most languages that include garbage collection allow you to turn it off; the same languages also allow you to explicitly control memory.

BS. Most languages don't allow you to turn off their GC, except if by it you mean doing silly tricks and jumping through hoops, using tons of memory to avoid having to GC, using pools of pre-allocated objects, not using any standard libs, etc. Even then, they are not callable from outside code (like C is and Rust tried to be) and memory use is huge.

> Rust tried to be

"Tried"? AIUI, every part of Rust is a work-in-progress.

Yes, that should be "tries". I meant the experiment with turning off the GC some months back.

> Most languages that include garbage collection allow you to turn it off

Hmm. Clearly I don't know much about this. How do you turn off garbage collection in Java and (say) Python?

Can't say for python but in Java off heap steuctures are pretty standard for performance critical components.

Interesting. Are there APIs to do this?

Python call gc.disable(). I'm not aware of any way to do it in Java other than raising the memory to available to such a high level that it doesn't become an issue (which would probably only work with processes that died, as opposed to long running programs).

gc.disable() introduces an unavoidable memory leak in my program. I also can't control the memory usage of the libraries I link against.

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