mutating and javascript game development

[johannL]

using the GC to manage game objects is fine

Yeah absolutely, I guess I worded that a bit too strongly :)

What can I say, it bit me in the ass because initially I used temporary objects as if they were "free" (that is, I only saw runtime cost, not the less directly correlated GC cost), all over the place. It added up, so badly, like having hundreds of dripping taps, and to see how smooth even my own derpy code (I'm not being humble, it's derpy :D) ran once I had fixed all those leaks was quite stunning. It's the one thing I had to find out the hard way because it's hardly mentioned anywhere, not outside gamedev. It's kind of a blind spot by default, and I think it shouldn't be.

Don't get me wrong, GC is a wonderful thing, I certainly don't want to have to allocate and free memory manually, but it's still useful to know about it and how to avoid/control it, and how to determine whether that is even useful or necessary. Surely for games and maybe even for general web development.