Linus Torvalds on Garbage Collection (2002)
Shortly before Linus wrote this article in 2002, I wrote an XML-RPC library in C that used reference counting. By the time I was done, I'd written 7,000+ lines of extremely paranoid C code, and probably eliminated all the memory leaks. The project cost my client ~$5K.The standard Python xmlrpc library was less than 800 lines of code, and it was probably written in a day or two.Was my library about 50 times faster? Sure, I could parse 1,500+ XML-RPC requests/second. Did anybody actually benfit from this speed? Probably not.But the real problem is even bigger: Virtually every reference-counting codebase I've ever seen was full of bugs and memory leaks, especially in the error-handling code. I don't think more than 5% of programmers are disciplined enough to get it right.If I'm paying for the code, I'll prefer GC almost every time. I value correctness and low costs, and only worry about performance when there's a clear business need.