Besides the practical issues of using GCs, I don't get them at a conceptual level.
Keeping track of resources is a big part of any software development. You have keep track of open files, user sessions, network connections, memory mappings, all kinds of caches, many other things... and allocated memory. And for some reason this last kind of resource we don't want to keep track of "manually", instead we expect the computer to do that work for us. Why should we handle dynamically allocated memory as a special case of resource management?
Don't get me wrong, I love having my computer do my work for me. I expect my compiler to be able to inline my code for me, optimize my arithmetic, unroll my loops and do all kinds of stuff for me. Stuff it's good at, stuff it can do at least as well as I can and probably much better. Memory management is not one of those things IMO.
I feel like memory management is like pointers in C, it's a mythical dragon that scares those who have never used them beforehand. It's really not that hard or that much of an issue in the real world. If you really can't keep track of your memory allocations then the solution is not to add a GC, you have a major architectural problem.
Keeping track of resources is a big part of any software development. You have keep track of open files, user sessions, network connections, memory mappings, all kinds of caches, many other things... and allocated memory. And for some reason this last kind of resource we don't want to keep track of "manually", instead we expect the computer to do that work for us. Why should we handle dynamically allocated memory as a special case of resource management?
Don't get me wrong, I love having my computer do my work for me. I expect my compiler to be able to inline my code for me, optimize my arithmetic, unroll my loops and do all kinds of stuff for me. Stuff it's good at, stuff it can do at least as well as I can and probably much better. Memory management is not one of those things IMO.
I feel like memory management is like pointers in C, it's a mythical dragon that scares those who have never used them beforehand. It's really not that hard or that much of an issue in the real world. If you really can't keep track of your memory allocations then the solution is not to add a GC, you have a major architectural problem.