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're done with objects. It wastes time, it wastes space, it wastes energy. If we'd spent that time developing smarter languages and compilers (Rust is a start, but not an end) we'd be better off as developers and as people. Garbage collection is just plain bad. I for one am glad we're finally ready to consider moving on.Think about it, instead of finding a way of expressing when we're done with instances, we have a giant for loop that iterates over all of memory over and over and over to guess when we're done with things. What a mess! If your co-worker proposed this as a solution you'd probably slap them. This article proposes hardware accelerating that for loop. It's like a horse-drawn carriage accelerated by rockets. It's the fastest horse.