For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection
IMO garbage collection is the epitome of sunk cost fallacy. Thirty years of good research thrown at a bad idea. The reality is we as developers choose not to give languages enough context to accurately infer the lifetime of objects. Instead of doing so we develop borderline self-aware programs to guess when we&#x27;re done with objects. It wastes time, it wastes space, it wastes energy. If we&#x27;d spent that time developing smarter languages and compilers (Rust is a start, but not an end) we&#x27;d be better off as developers and as people. Garbage collection is just plain bad. I for one am glad we&#x27;re finally ready to consider moving on.<p>Think about it, instead of finding a way of expressing when we&#x27;re done with instances, we have a giant for loop that iterates over <i>all of memory</i> over and over and over to guess when we&#x27;re done with things. What a mess! If your co-worker proposed this as a solution you&#x27;d probably slap them. This article proposes hardware accelerating that for loop. It&#x27;s like a horse-drawn carriage accelerated by rockets. It&#x27;s the <i>fastest</i> horse.