Yeah, I think thought he was basically saying that the records come from COBOL, and the pointers come from Lisp. So then C/C++/Go are derived from BOTH COBOL and Lisp.
I think he is being a little imprecise there but the meaning gets through. The point is that Go programmers can structure their data so as minimitze garbage collection overhead, but Java programmers can't. I'm pretty sure this was mentioned in some of the recent Go garbage collector design docs, so it's a pretty relevant point.
I always thought of C/C++/Go as ALGOL-like languages, but I guess that refers to the syntax (block structure) and not semantics (the data model, which I prefer over "memory model").
> The point is that Go programmers can structure their data so as minimitze garbage collection overhead, but Java programmers can't.
There is an anecdote that Minecraft, in the old days, used to pass around block coordinates as "int x, int y, int z" rather than as an instance of a BlockCoordinate class in order to reduce GC overhead. The BlockCoordinate class was introduced by a refactoring later on, thus turning Minecraft into the memory hog it now is.
So you can certainly optimize for GC overhead in Minecraft, though probably at the expense of readability.
> I think he is being a little imprecise there but the meaning gets through.
It's one thing not to go into details. It's quite another to misrepresent them. To describe C and Go as somehow alike in their memory allocation strategy, as though C were garbage-collected, is to foster a misconception.
I think he is being a little imprecise there but the meaning gets through. The point is that Go programmers can structure their data so as minimitze garbage collection overhead, but Java programmers can't. I'm pretty sure this was mentioned in some of the recent Go garbage collector design docs, so it's a pretty relevant point.
I always thought of C/C++/Go as ALGOL-like languages, but I guess that refers to the syntax (block structure) and not semantics (the data model, which I prefer over "memory model").