ingenter

Edit: I didn't explain why this change is important: if the Promise is catching the exception, the Execution Context where exception was thrown is lost and (potentially) irrecoverable, the program has to crash there and now if you want to debug the reason for the exception. This is a property of the Promise standard, changes to debugging tools or environment won't help. You could make Node aware of promises, and capture the execution context with promise exception, but I don't think Promises are special enough.

Comment · 10 years ago

> To make your GC-when-appropriate advice real, one has to show a real implmentation.

I haven't tested it closely, but I believe that Rust with this crate: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc is an implementation for "GC only when you need it".

Comment · 10 years ago

> Your prelude and the followup question is not well-formed.

Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it.

> C++ programmers do not have a bias against GC as a specific problem-solving technique. Expert C++ programmers can embrace GC

Please watch this portion of the video, and the way the speaker is pronouncing the word "collect":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfmTagWcqoE#t=1h5m25s

Regarding general-purpose GC:

I don't support using GC for everything. If there is a problem that can only be solved with GC, it doesn't mean that we should express our entire running programs in terms of dynamic cyclic graphs. I believe we can do much better, with much fewer resources.

Comment · 10 years ago

> No program language I am aware of (and I don't claim to know all) are good at saying "GC this 5%, I'll explicitly handle everything else"

I haven't used rust in production, but I think it allows you to do precisely this, using the following crate: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc.

> Of course, there is an argument that just GCing everything is as efficient as bothering with manual memory management

I specifically said that it should be possible to mix GC with other types of memory management.

The problem is that I often hear from C++ crowd "GC is bad, mmkay!", without mentioning that there are specific cases where you have to use/implement GC.

Comment · 10 years ago

Do you understand that the linked article, and the talk referenced in the article describe a way to implement garbage collection as a solution to (memory management for) data structures with cycles?

Do you think that this problem is not equivalent to "how do I allow my dog to make a 'press this button for fart sound' app?"?

Do you have a better solution to reclaiming data structures with cyclic pointers?

Comment · 10 years ago

You haven't answered my question. Please re-read it carefully.

Comment · 10 years ago

I recently watched Herb Sutter's talk "Leak-Freedom in C++", described in the article [1], and I can't help but notice that C++ community has a strong bias against garbage collection. ... And then he describes the very problem you can't solve without GC: memory management for graphs with cycles. Solving this problem is equivalent to implementing GC. Of course, having your own specialized GC may help, but you may also benefit from your own memory allocation.

Why can't you acknowledge that there are problems that have GC as the only and best solution?

(Note: it's possible to mix memory management approaches, e.g only pointers to graph nodes are being garbage collected and everything else has a nice hierarchical ownership.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfmTagWcqoE

Comment · 10 years ago

Because there is always a way to extract the "protected" work. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole.

If you're a photographer, I can always make a screenshot, or record the video from my HDMI/DVI cable to the monitor or take a very precise photo of my screen, and I WILL get the photo from your website or app.

There is plenty of evidence that DRM doesn't stop copying: millions of torrents ripped from crunchyroll/hulu/netflix/Blu-Rays, all of those have some sort of DRM, all of them were circumvented. There are people who think that DRM is not designed to stop copying, but it's designed to control how legitimate users consume your product (see: DVD ads).

Edit: Please don't assume that this is the only argument I have, it's just the most obvious argument from the top of my head. There are plenty of people who explain the negative sides of DRM and reasons it doesn't solve the problem you described. They do it in a very eloquent way with rigorous arguments, and I don't believe that I need to repeat those arguments. I'd like you to listen to Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg