@ryo @charliebrownau @furgar Garbage collection is perfectly fine for userspace stuff, particularly when you don't have to squeeze out every last bit of performance.

You don't want it in your kernel, of course, but for an XMPP client, it really doesn't matter. Definitely worth it, better than Pidgin leaking almost 16 GB of memory, like what happened to me.

Also, let's say that you make a media player based on ffmpeg. You don't want ffmpeg itself to make any compromises on performance, but the media player itself, that can have garbage collection, it's fine.

On the other hand, if you make a tool that will be used for scripting and that people may run hundreds of thousands of times on a loop, then you want maximum performance as well.

It depends, really. For anything that I would make myself, I don't think there would be a downside. Though with it being optional, you can always turn it off when you want to, and fortunately, idiots will not, and that's a good thing because a lot of software is made by idiots or inexperienced people. And again, with it being optional, the people that know what they're doing can change it. It's kinda like typing. In CL, you can disable dynamic typing in specific functions. Makes sense to me, it's there in case you need to optimize certain functions.

Oh, it's also worth mentioning that it makes the language better for teaching and learning, so it will have more adoption, and then those people can choose how to manage memory manually later. Smoother learning curve. If that was done, maybe we wouldn't be stuck in a world where everything is written in Python and slow as shit, and maybe scripting languages wouldn't be as much of a thing. But no, everything has to go one way or another because everyone insists that everything has to be done one way in every situation.

Well, at least it's not my problem, doesn't affect me, I'm just not going to contribute to any of that at all... is what I would say, except software got so shitty that it actually did affect me.