On: For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage C...

[simiones]

The nicest point about GC is that, for the vast majority of data, you no longer need to have a concept of ownership at all.

Ownership is not a fundamental architectural property - it is "only" a powerful technique for tracking data with a specific lifetime (of course, even in GC languages you still need proper ownership semantics for some pieces of data).

[blub → simiones]

Ownership itself might not be, but lifetimes are and the two concepts are tightly related.

That's why Java and C# both had to introduce a way of (semi-)automatically closing resources, waiting for the GC was a catastrophe.

[pjmlp → blub]

Common Lisp, CLU, Mesa/Cedar, Modula-3 and many other system languages with GC always supported those kind of mechanisms.

Java and C# did nothing new there, only catching up with was already the state of the art before they were born.

[maxxxxx → blub]

That’s what I find ironic about C#. In some ways I worry more about and do more manual memory management than I did in C++.