3 comments

  • hamstergene 2 minutes ago
    What I didn’t like about this series of books was choosing “garbage collection” as umbrella term for both tracing GC and reference counting, without verifying if programming community would agree with that, which turned out they didn’t.

    I’ve seen a lot of threads here and on reddit where people were arguing about terminology purely because of this book alone.

    By that definition, C++ code has garbage collection if it uses std::shared_ptr, going against widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones.

    “Automatic Memory Management” is a lot more suitable description to what programmers have to do to manage memory; it is now in the title but still hasn’t become the primary term.

  • rayiner 36 minutes ago
    How good are AIs at coding manual memory management? Is this a sea change in automatic memory management?
  • orionblastar 2 hours ago
    I remember reading it before. My son threw it away when we moved houses, not knowing how important it was. I'd recommend it.
    • tikhonj 1 hour ago
      Ironic that this of all books got garbage collected prematurely.
    • travisgriggs 1 hour ago
      Q: what kind of collection is this real world example illustrating?

      A: Copying Garbage Collector (semi space). Chapter 4!

      Great book. I was always fascinated by bakers treadmill. Always wanted a real world case where I could implement one with Fibonacci sized mills.