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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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You cannot have a safe language without ownership and lifetimes and also without a GC. Ownership and lifetimes are essential complexity in safe languages. But I doubt a fast GC optimized for systems like patterns will be useful in practice

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Java is heavily used without any GC in secure element environments. Developers need to use object pools to reuse objects since they can't be released. There are many other examples of safe languages without either of those things. You can also simply only provide value types.

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Java Card 3.0 introduced GC support but that's barely used by anyone. Java Card 2.x didn't have GC and the vast majority of secure elements including SIM cards, NFC and others (NXP, etc. SEs used in many products) lack it. Other examples like it but probably not as broadly used.

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I am sorry but your statement is wrong. JCSystem.requestObjectDeletion() exists since JavaCard 2.2 which is year 2002. It doesn't have automatic GC but on request.

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Object deletion is an optional feature that's usually not implemented. It's in no way mandatory to provide any kind of GC, and most implementations don't provide GC support. Adoption is even slower than ISO C revisions so date of the standard's release doesn't matter much either.

7:45 AM · Jul 28, 2022Twitter Web App

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Agree that it's optional but in my experience, most of the time it is implemented. Especially you said about NXP SE and believe me, it has it. I am telling you as one of the developers of NXP SE OS. 🙂

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It's almost never implemented and when it is implemented, it's usually barely more than a proof of concept with terrible performance. That's the case even on the modern smart cards. Based on the wording in the latest standards, object deletion has remained optional anyway.