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My strong feeling is that the "memory safe systems programming language that's easier to use than Rust" that everyone wants is going to have to have something that looks a lot like a garbage collector. There's a lot of room to design a fast GC for "systems-like" patterns.

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Jul 27

You could imagine a system that integrated tracing GC for language-native objects with reference counting, or conservatively scanned C heaps, for FFI objects, for instance.

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Main thing is that the tracing GC or automatic reference counting really needs to be thread local. Most overhead comes from needing to provide thread safety (atomics, barriers, etc.). Can just give up on that and use explicit automatic reference counted container types like Rust.

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and

nginx has a variant of JS (njs) that's scoped to web server requests so there's mostly no use for doing GC. You can use arrays, objects, closures, etc. It allocates with the usual nginx thread-local allocation pools and then all of the JS memory is freed when the request ends.

10:59 PM · Jul 27, 2022Twitter Web App

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