On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
A better approach is the one Apple uses with Swift (and before that, Objective-C… though that wasn’t memory safe).
In swift the compiler writes virtually all of your memory management code for you, and you can write a bit of code (or annotate things) for rare edge cases where you need memory management to do something other than the default behaviour.
There’s no garbage collection, but 99.999% of your code looks exactly like a garbage collected language. And there’s no performance penalty either… in fact it tends to be faster because compiler engineers are better at memory management than run of the mill coders.
To be fair, Swift uses reference counting instead of garbage collection which has different tradeoffs than GC but does incur a performance penalty.
I wish more languages used ref counting. Yes, you have to be careful of circular refs, but the tradeoff is simplicity, speed, lack of needing threads in the runtime, and predictability. Rust gives you special data structures for ref counting for a reason.
Ref counting is just a very basic GC. I’d be surprised if a ref counted language performed better than a GC one. Sure, the program won’t temporarily halt in order to run the GC, but every copy/destroy operation will be slower.
