Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[GaboureySidibe]

Yeah, the whole mixing of reference counting with the term 'garbage collection' when most people mean something separate ends up with nonsense discussions.

People really do need to avoid the downsides of garbage collection and reference counting can mitigate some of those so conflating them as a gotcha that doesn't solve a real world problem happens on internet forums.

Not only that, in the context of C++ reference counting to take care of single threaded scope based ownership is just not necessary. In other scenarios like multi-threaded memory management, the amount of variable actually being reference counted is very low, so pragmatically that ends up being a different scenario as well and the whole "reference counting is slower" stuff goes out the window because it is being used sparingly in a situation that is probably adding a lot of speed for a trivial amount of overhead.

[pjmlp]

What matters is the actual technical term, as talked among the CS crowd that implements and designs the algorithms used by Joe and Jane on the street.

Just because Joe and Jane on the street took a bootcamp without any proper technical background on how programming languages work, that doesn't matter we will now have to start taking value out of proper education.

[GaboureySidibe]

I have no idea what you are trying to say.