267

White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by crimsonpoodle@pawb.social to c/programming@programming.dev

139 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] roanutil_@programming.dev 7 points 8 months ago

To be fair, Swift uses reference counting instead of garbage collection which has different tradeoffs than GC but does incur a performance penalty.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 0 points 8 months ago

I wish more languages used ref counting. Yes, you have to be careful of circular refs, but the tradeoff is simplicity, speed, lack of needing threads in the runtime, and predictability. Rust gives you special data structures for ref counting for a reason.

[-] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Ref counting is just a very basic GC. I'd be surprised if a ref counted language performed better than a GC one. Sure, the program won't temporarily halt in order to run the GC, but every copy/destroy operation will be slower.

[-] seeaya@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

When Apple introduced the iPhone they required automatic reference counting to be used in Objective-C rather than tracing garbage collection (the language supported both) due to performance reasons (iPhones were significantly slower than Macs). At least Apple seems to think that reference counting is faster than tracing garbage collectors. The compiler can do a lot to remove unnecessary releases and retains. Additionally each retain is just incrementing an integer, and each release is just decrementing an integer and comparing the integer to 0, so the overhead is pretty small.

[-] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

If the compiler optimizes away some RC then I see how it can be faster.

this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024

267 points (96.5% liked)

Programming

17314 readers

244 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz