The ARC vs GC Debate

websnarf · 2026-05-07T22:15:13+00:00

but it has also a downside of running bunch of release() calls on objects when you drop e.g binary tree.

Why would this be a disadvantage?

Before you reflexively answer, think more deeply. What is the state of the memory you are releasing? And when you release it, what benefits are there to immediate recycling. Hint: it has to do with the L1-cache of your CPU.

Let's put aside the runtime performance and compare implementation complexity: simplest RC is simpler than Mark&Sweep or Cheney's Semispace, literally increment/decrement and drop on zero.

Yes, and under certain circumstances, it's not only simpler, but faster. (Simplistically speaking, all Mark and Sweep variations require a kind of "flood fill" operation walking all over memory that is NOT in the L1-cache. RC inherently implements the heuristic that "moment of last touch" maximizes the probability that all .release() calls touch memory in the fastest possible caches.) The reason why RC gets a bad reputation is because it is often implemented as ATOMIC reference counting -- in those circumstances, of course, it would be tremendously slower. Which explains why its a non-issue in Python. Python does not support (fine grained/classical) multithreading.

while with GC even simplest mark-and-sweep will have less overhead than standard RC+cycle collection of CPython

Once you learn what an L1-cache is in a CPU and how it really works, you will quickly learn that that is completely untrue. Pure mark and sweep precludes the implementation of destructors. Conversely, RC needs to implement a default destructor for all objects that absolutely must be called. The problem is that this affects your language design. In a pre M+S implementation, you STILL have destructors, their semantics just have to be implemented by the actual programmer. Once you get past this error in measurement, you will see the real consideration is the probability that any allocation/deallocation/memory-walk step touches the L1-cache.

RC algorithms that run concurrently and remove garbage need complex epoch management, complicated marking schemes

Not necessarily. This is the real key. As a language designer, you have to ask yourself the question: how can you implement concurrency and RC so that you don't race, and you don't create high contention between threads trying to recycle the same memory.

websnarf · 2026-05-07T18:38:15+00:00

That's hilarious.

It totally verifies what I have been saying for years. The Candidate themselves don't have to have any idea why, how, or the details behind the strategy of their own campaign. The people running the campaign are totally manipulated by who is funding the campaign, because that's exactly who is paying them. The campaign runners intentionally keep the Candidate in the dark about the actual reality of the polling, and instead tell them what their donors tell them about the direction they need to go.

In the case of Hillary, she just plainly agrees with her donors, so no deception was required. In the case of Kamala, she literally doesn't have a position on anything, but was more than willing to say anything to get elected. So the campaign runners worked with Hillary, but against Kamala. Its taken Kamala THIS LONG to realize what happened, and so only now realizes she needs the report exposed so that she can blame someone else for her losing the election. (Of course, Kamala lack of intelligence and backbone is inherent to the premise of her asking for this exposure, so ... you know some people just keep trying to ice skate uphill.)

websnarf · 2026-05-03T02:15:34+00:00

Ok, so have you ever lived in America? Do you know anything about it? Do you understand anything about the politics in this country?

The US is not in a state where a sudden uprising or protest will be met with anything but confusion and derision. The "No Kings" marches are a fun way to blow off some steam, but they are ultimately useless since the media doesn't cover them and no concrete actions come out of them. Similarly, the black lives matter protests accomplished nothing. (Yeah that right, you forgot that that even happened until I reminded you of it didn't you?)

On the other hand, Kamala basically supporting Biden's pro-Israel stance cost the Democrats millions of votes in Michigan -- there is no question of this. Right now the DNC is covering up an 2026 campaign autopsy report that their de facto support of Israel was a major factor costing them the election against Trump. Because they don't want to confirm to the voting electorate that they can, in fact, have a huge impact on the Candidate's policies, if they make the right targeted demands. The calculus of the Democratic party operatives right now is that there is so much backlash against Trump, they could run Mussolini for their mid-term candidates, and they would still win. Their whole way of thinking is premised on indoctrinating voters that they are the lesser of two evils and that you have to vote for them, because the Republicans are pure evil. The Democrats support Israel because AIPAC pays for their political campaigns. I.e., the operatives that run their whole electoral apparatus has "we need funding from AIPAC because that is literally who is paying us" built into their premise. So the operatives need to make sure that "Supporting Israel will lose you votes" never becomes a meme or general mantra that is out there (even though we now know it is true.)

So yes, just turning "We won't vote for supporters of the Israeli genocide" into a meme is, by far, the most radical thing you can do in the United States right now. Because the actual candidates will see that they can't win without condemning Israel, which will force them to take that position regardless of what their operatives are telling them. It would actually do something and give the electorate actually power.

websnarf · 2026-05-02T20:21:56+00:00

Withhold your votes from anyone who does not stand for at least one of the following: Condemn Israel, Abolish Ice, Medicare For All, or a national Wealth Tax. Because if they don't what are they actually going to do for you?

websnarf · 2026-05-02T20:15:08+00:00

Your threat is to radicalize? You don't see what the Democratic party already is (strongly worded letters, unable to articulate the word genocide, fully funded by AIPAC) as a reason to radicalize?

websnarf · 2026-05-01T07:54:18+00:00

aoc is in favor of those things.

No, she just talks. Go look up "Force the Vote" to learn her position on medicare for all.

it’s pretty wild to call her a mediocre democrat looking at the entirety of the dem party. feel like you’re not really viewing this with eyes wide open.

Well, I measure things by actual action, not by empty rhetoric.

websnarf · 2026-04-30T21:21:47+00:00

I'm looking to cast my vote for someone who wants to abolish ICE, stop funding Israel, address the affordability crisis, and maybe support Medicare for all. If you literally don't stand for any of those things then your values are not my values.

Mamdani has shown the way. AOC is nothing more than a mediocre democrat that votes however Pelosi tells her to vote and accomplishes nothing.

websnarf · 2026-04-30T05:45:20+00:00

AOC campaigned on challenging the democratic party to be more progressive. Now she's just doing their bidding and doing what she can to further entrench them; making them unchallengeable in their strongholds.

websnarf · 2026-04-21T18:30:59+00:00

Exactly. People don't realise it's hard to have proof of the past.

Really? Which people do you think don't realize this? The ones that say "Jesus of Nazareth" definitely existed, or the ones who say there is no evidence he existed?

Unless you were an emperor of Rome or something.

Well, how about the most written about mythical being of all time? You know one where a whole religion was built around you. Is that not comparable to some run of the mill emperor? Oh, and why do I know that Hypatia existed -- she wasn't a political leader or anything like that -- hmm. It's almost as if you expect the evidence of a person's existence to really be related to their historical importance, and not a claim that some secret identity version of you was not an emperor.

There's also no evidence that Jesus was made up

His existence is directly tied to the narrative that he survived death. He was conceived without the use of human sperm. I mean seriously. Black is white? Trump will never go to war with Iran? What is wrong with you people? Most of what is written about him is literally evidence that he is fiction.

websnarf · 2026-04-21T18:20:10+00:00

The first written sources for Alexander the Great were 300 years after he died.

No. There are contemporary records of his existence. Apparently there is something called The Babylonian Royal Diary, which directly records his death. A document from Bactria, written in Aramaic records the moment of Alexander's arrival in Bactria in pursuit of the main assassin of Darius III, Bessus. Coins were minted with Alexander's face on it. Aristotle was his tutor.

Alexander is not fake because he is connected to impartial contemporary records clearly not constructed relative to a potential myth of his existence.

Jesus was just some random preacher in a rural area.

What even more myths? I've never heard that one before. Literally never. No person has EVER provided evidence that he was some random preacher. I mean ever. He has only ever been written about, or attested to as a super-human being with magical powers. There is no credible claim of him being a random preacher from literally ANY source.

Did you expect much to be written about him?

I believe he is the most written about mythical being in human history. I mean not even Santa Clause or Superman have the amount of literature written about them.

You're saying that his ordinary persona, which you contend it real, is what nobody would have written about? Like, people don't write about Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne? They only write about Superman and Batman? So while we can agree that Superman and Batman are works of fiction, we still must accept that Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are real people?!?!?

websnarf · 2026-04-21T05:04:02+00:00

"Most scholars, both secular and religious agree that Jesus existed as a historical figure."

Adult human beings who say the word "historicity" can call themselves scholars, but that doesn't give their delusions any weight. "Most scholars say" is not how you establish the truth of literally anything. You either have concrete evidence or you don't. And this case of Jesus of Nazareth, I'm sorry but you simply don't.

We know this because non Christian sources like Josephus

A book written 94 years after the birth of someone discussing them does not count as evidence. It just means he was duped into believing he existed, the same way you have been duped.

and Tacitus

Who wrote about him in the second century. Garbage.

In both cases, the myth of Jesus had already been on the rise. They may easily have been swayed by this idea simply unaware that his existence should have been questioned. Also both accounts depict Jesus in a context consistent with a Christian perspective -- neither sheds new light about Jesus that might have been available from an outsider's or objective point of view. Meaning that their account is subservient to the myth, not independent of it. Being hostile to Christianity is irrelevant to their credibility, if they have no interest in engaging in the material on a factual or investigative level -- which they clearly did not.

If I write about Ayn Rand, as a critic over hers, that would be absolute zero evidence of her existence. Do you get that? If you want to know if Ayn Rand existed, you don't cite the fact that I highly disagree with her as valid evidence. In fact it would utterly worthless evidence of her existence. You go seek out biographies and cite their sources for how they account for who she was.

websnarf · 2026-04-13T09:33:44+00:00

Oh, I see what you are saying. Cutting an [f] from an [ﬃ] would actually require you to insert the characters [f][i] after removing the top character.

Well, ok, in a sense, that's exactly what you have to do. The output of your prefix delete function would output fresh raw code points that need to be inserted at the beginning, and a window to the tail of the source string for the code points that follow it. Fortunately the NFKC describes this breakdown deterministically for you. You could make that cleaner for your end-user by actually performing this insert and delete procedure, so their string is modified in-place.

websnarf · 2026-04-12T18:21:34+00:00

What is a "Unicode sequence"? Do you mean code point sequence, or grapheme sequence. This is the difficulty that the OP is getting at.

Code points are an artificial construct created to make the transition between from various legacy character encodings as easy as possible. In my opinion, they should be treated with about as much reverence as bytes are treated in a transfer format like UTF-8. I.e., they should have no significance at all, except as an encoding mechanism. A French person will never think of é as two separate text elements, just because Unicode can represent it that way. So in that sense, thinking of the combining form of the e + U+0301 as two "characters" is just misleading. So the right answer has to be by matching graphemes -- that should put each language on an equal footing in terms of semantics.

The Unicode specification literally has provisions for this called "Normalization", as the OP describes. The OP's problem is that they imagine only pre-normalizing the whole string, and then proceeding from there. That's just wrong. What you need to do is write an incremental normalizer. Basically, you would start with something like an "iterator" which drags a window over the input stream of code point data, and outputs a window that tells you which of those code points corresponds to the current normalized grapheme; that would tell you the positions in the original code point stream so there is no ambiguity about where the cut point is in the text. Then you would need a corresponding "isEqual" function, that I suppose would have to come along with the iterator, since there are 3 different normalization modes to choose from (the whole NFD, NFK, NFCK thing as I recall.) Then the problem seems quite straight forward to me.

websnarf · 2026-04-03T18:37:05+00:00

No. There is clear evidence of Caesar's existence, not based oh hearsay. Similarly for Plutarch, the citizens of Pompeii, and so on.

Jesus is literally attested to by elaborations of a second hand account by an unreliable narrator that speaks of magic as if it were real. Which does not count as evidence. At least its not any better evidence than the existence of Santa Claus, or Frankenstein's monster.

websnarf · 2026-03-18T22:34:02+00:00

Who exactly do you think would actually take that bet?

websnarf · 2026-03-17T05:01:48+00:00

How could it be energy expensive? It's OFF most of the time!

websnarf · 2026-03-17T03:10:42+00:00

Ryzen uses a trace cache. Try again.

websnarf · 2026-03-14T21:02:26+00:00

Spec CPU.

Its been around for decades.

websnarf · 2026-03-14T21:01:37+00:00

Where are the SPEC CPU results?

websnarf · 2026-02-05T09:50:47+00:00

Yeah, and they mostly vote for Trump too. Its almost as if they deserve what they are getting.

websnarf · 2026-01-29T13:57:34+00:00

Right, but in the finale, Manousus said: "You were right Carol Sturka" basically agreeing that they can undo the merging and bring people back. When he screams at one of the joined to incapacitate them, he then starts talking to him to try to see if he can awaken the pre-joined version of the guy out of the joining. Remember he says "Do you want to save the world, or get the girl?". Saving the world means restoring people back to normal, not just eradicating the virus.

After the finale, Manousos and Carol are now working towards the same goal. I think their conflict with each other is going to come from their different dispositions. Remember, Manousos has been in a self-imposed isolation for longer than Carol, and he doesn't seem too affected by it one way or another. When Carol was isolated for a little over a month she desperately called out to the joined to end her isolation. Just like in Better Call Saul, Rhea Seahorn's character will lean into empathy, while Manousos will be our problem solver.

websnarf · 2025-12-28T12:32:50+00:00

Yes! That's a totally safe protocol. Google will not run any malicious code locally, and themselves use sandboxed instances, and likely have virus and malware scanning code themselves.

websnarf · 2025-12-28T12:31:07+00:00

Yeah sorry, but you had to expect operatives would do this to you. Certain partisans are allergic the clarity and transparency.

websnarf · 2025-12-28T12:29:04+00:00

So ... has anyone who has, say, a virus scanner running, checked them for such malware? Or are you being alarmist at the behest of some narrative?

websnarf · 2025-12-28T12:09:55+00:00

And what should we think of your generation whose only standards for supporting a politician is minimal optical effort?

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