Ask HN: Why garbage collection?

3 pointschrisdew4 comments

C programmers (myself included) can often write correct programs with manual memory management (malloc/free).

Why can't a sufficiently capable compiler/language manage its memory based on static analysis of a program? (i.e. insert its own 'free's where a programmer would have put them)

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They can, and it's basically what LLVM does when you turn on ARC for your Objective-C program.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6385212/how-does-the-new-...

Thanks, that's really interesting.

Read all about it and it seems to just be reference counting :-( Not as exciting as it seemed.

Well that's kinda in the name. ARC = Automatic Reference Counting.

Besides, who's looking for exciting? It's freedom from stupid memory errors. That's awesome!

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