Hacker News Reader

> it adds 50% to dev time

Just to be clear, do you mean that writing in C++ and doing manual memory management doubles dev time, or makes it 1.5 times as long as it would be in a garbage collected language?

Also, where does most of that extra dev time go? Being careful while coding to make sure you're managing memory right, or debugging when problems come up?

View on HN

I don't think that doing manual memory management doubles dev time for experienced devs, no... I just mean that, if you're trying to eliminate GC hiccups by, say, writing a custom allocator in C++ (i.e., exactly what we had to do with this project I was on at Google), it just adds up.

I.e., it's not the manual memory management that's expensive per se, it's that manual memory management opens up optimization paths that, while worthwhile given an appropriately latency-sensitive system, take a long time to walk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com