It would be good if people were more up-front about the tradeoff Go makes with its GC, but it is probably not reasonable to say that it’s a bogus tradeoff.
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Replying to @tqbf @KirinDave
The tradeoff Go made is the wrong one for most applications. That’s the issue.
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Replying to @pcwalton @KirinDave
That is a difficult argument to square with empirical observation.
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Replying to @tqbf @KirinDave
That’s what I’m talking about. Go’s GC benchmarks well, but it is making the wrong tradeoffs. Throughput matters a lot.https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd8e …
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Replying to @pcwalton @KirinDave
Yeah, I read that like everyone else. I understand what a generational collector is. The problem with your argument, I think, is that there are much more popular languages with similarly dumb GCs that Go outperforms.
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You want to be arguing that Go’s GC is SUBOPTIMAL. But instead, you’re arguing that it’s INAPPROPRIATE. You’re going to lose that argument.
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Replying to @tqbf @KirinDave
But I’m only arguing that the Go GC design is suboptimal. I’m not trying to argue that it doesn’t work at all. My problem is that people don’t realize that it’s suboptimal. We’re forgetting all the lessons we learned in the ‘90s, which is tragic.
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Replying to @pcwalton @KirinDave
There are a lot of good ideas in CS that turn out not to have a whole lot of practical benefit for huge ranges of real-world problems. Look at the instruction set we all code to now! TRAGIC.
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Replying to @tqbf @KirinDave
Are you trying to argue that generational GC does not have a practical benefit for most programs? Because that would be very hard to successfully argue!
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Replying to @pcwalton @KirinDave
Yes, I am arguing that there are huge numbers of important commercial programming problems that don’t care whether their GC is generational or — scarier still! — care much more about latency than throughput.
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I agree that most software doesn’t care that much about the difference between generational and non-generational GC. I also agree that many apps care more about latency than throughput. However, the extreme “latency at all costs” decisions Go made are suboptimal for most apps.
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