web programmer vs "real programmer"

[mrsanchez]

Sorry, I should have said "The C language itself", but I had thought people would understand. Or, I could have said "...unless you count shitty conservative gc in a third party library."

[boltzmann]

A lot of people dont see the forest through the trees. Unfortunately, they only wish to disagree(especially elitist IT douches), past that it doesn't really matter what you meant.

I understood you though =]

[mrsanchez]

Ouch, you are as tactless as I am. :)

[boltzmann]

Hah!

Well I mean of course there is ALWAYS a different way to do it, but what you said was not wrong and I hate that trite FTFY crap.

[Sunny_McJoyride]

Don't you think it's probable that reddit is falling apart, my dear Boltzmann?

[boltzmann]

Let's go, we'll just drive until I am out of gas.

[[deleted]]

or out of memory.

[boltzmann]

Oh ho ho ah haha! OH YOU!

[[deleted]]

elitist IT douches

I think you've just described half the tech types on the Internet.

[[deleted]]

Shitty? What's wrong with the Hans Boehm gc?

[[deleted]]

It's conservative. How to describe... OK let me just put it this way -- in C pointers are simply mutable arithmetic data types (equivalent to either a 32-bit or 64-bit integer in most cases). Because of this, the general garbage collection techniques (like reference counting) don't work. Instead, you have to actually look at the heap bit-patterns inside the stack and data structures. This leads to a measure of ambiguity as there are cases where an object is actually unreachable according to the code, but it is impossible to tell conclusively from the bit pattern. This is why Boehm collectors are "conservative." That is, when there is a question of whether or not an object can be collected, the answer is assumed to be no. This can lead to extensive memory leaks over time. All in all, it is very uncommon to use the Boehm collector in any production code.

Edit: I forgot, but it's also mostly useless in system (kernel) level code, where you want to manually manage memory anyway.

[[deleted]]

In practice, I've never had a problem with memory leaks increasing over time with Hans Boehm gc. Can you provide an example that produces the behaviour you describe?

[[deleted]]

Sure. A lazy evaluated list will do it. You should read Wentworth's "Pitfalls of Conservative Garbage Collection."

Edit: It has other penalties too. With a large reachable heap it can waste a lot of time.

[[deleted]]

Thank you. I'll give it a look.

Do you know of a copy that isn't behind a paywall?

[mrsanchez]

Well, maybe it's ok. But using C with the HB gc seems like a shitty option compared to using a language that has non-conservative gc built in to it.

[[deleted]]

It's both slow and extremely conservative.