Baby's First Garbage Collector
So every once in a while I come across old timey C optimizations in the spirit of Duff's device or bit twiddling to swap variables, 'etc 'etc...<p>While they have a certain kind of charm to them they seem to be almost universally bested by increasingly mature compilers and complex (or virtualized) hardware.<p>So I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that clever pointer arithmetic games and even manual malloc/free are <i>increasingly</i> futile unless you're targeting embedded devices. If a young language like Go gets you at least in the same ballpark as C with a relatively immature GC and even toy implementations like the OP take you rather far these days... when is coding without a garbage collector even really defensible anymore?<p>I'm not trolling. I think pointer arithmetic is neat and the aforementioned "optimizations" are magical and possibly my generation has missed out on something wonderful. Seems it just isn't often practical to do that sort of thing anymore.<p>Edit: I'd like to stress that I wasn't talking in absolutes, and asking rather than telling. I'm not sure how to phrase my post better, made some edits nonetheless.