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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Why GC is so important
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Ted Leung covers a lot of interesting ground on dynamic systems in this post, but this paragraph on the benefits of GC really jumped out at me:
In the early 90's when I argued with people about Lisp like languages, I was always getting pushback on the syntax, and on garbage collection. Today, I no longer have to argue with people about garbage collection. Java and C# have made it acceptable. But people misunderstand its importance in constructing modular systems. Most people like garbage collection because it eliminates memory smashes. This is true and definitely a big benefit. But the bigger benefit of having garbage collection in the language is that subsystem designers no longer have to worry about which subsystem owns the memory. This makes it much easier to break things apart and reuse them. When you have to manage memory by hand, your subsystem has two "protocols" jammed into a single mode of expression (the API). You have the application level protocol for the subsystem, and you have the memory management protocol for the system, so that subsystem users know how to interact with objects that came from the system. We don't have to deal with that any more and that decouples subsystems a lot. So we killed two birds with one stone, but we only saw the carcass of the smaller bird.
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