Quote:
Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan
Yes, but that's a very main question if you try to do something professional.
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How main the question is depends on what you are doing.
Hardware gets progressively smaller, faster, and cheaper. A chap elsewhere was reviewing a book on programming in the Python language. Python is technically a script language, compiling to a tokenized intermediate form that is executed by the language runtime. But as hardware gets smaller, faster, and cheaper, you reach a point where you can
use something like Python where you previously had to compile to native code, because performance will be acceptable. The book in question was about programming in Python on the Raspberry Pi, an ARM based single board computer using an ARM cortex CPU that runs a custom version of Debian Linux called Raspbian which comes with Python as a built-in. The lowest end Raspberry Pi device is the Raspberry Pi Zero, which retails for
$5 USD.
The efforts I've seen where the overhead of garbage collection becomes critical are in the embedded space with limited hardware resources and you need real-time performance where GC won't slow things down at a critical point.
Languages like Rust try to eliminate the
need for GC, by guaranteeing allocated memory is automatically freed when everything that used that memory has released it, instead of requiring routines to look for stuff no longer used that can be freed.
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Dennis