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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I use a GC'd language for UI every day -- Emacs -- and it runs well even on potato-tier hardware. The first GUI with all the features we'd recognize was written in a GC'd language, Smalltalk.

GCs introduce some overhead but they alone are not responsible for the bloat in Electron. JavaScript bloat is a development skill issue arising from a combination of factors, including retaining low-skill front end devs, little regard for dependency bloat, ads, and management prioritizing features over addressing performance issues.

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There's also a lot of fast software written in Golang. GC has an undeserved bad reputation.

It's all nice and fast until the GC eats up all the CPU time under memory pressure (e.g. container memory limit). GC deserves its bad rep, even if GC implementations have gotten a lot better over time.

GC also disqualifies a language from ever being used for anything but userland programs.

Containers for Go software have no sense. You can cross compile stuff from anywhere to anywhere. And the binaries are self contained.

Which isn't really going to happen or be noticeable in this case. Yeah GC is slightly slower, but it's like blaming a 10-minute mile on your shoes. SDN or DBMS written in a GC'd language is probably not a good idea.

It's not that they lack the skill. It's that they don't care.

If they do care then they probably depend on someone who doesn't.

I hate the framing that developers are the people not caring. It's a ridiculous misrepresentation of the dynamics I've seen everywhere. Developers usually love optimizing stuff. However, they are under pressure to deliver functional changes. One could blame "the business" for not caring and not making time for shipping a quality product. However, these business decisions are made because that's what wins customers. Customers might complaint that that wasn't more lightweight software. But clearly their stated preference doesn't match their revealed preference.

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