Alabhya Jindal

Memory management

Garbage collector has given the biggest boost to programmer productivity since the invention of programming languages.

A GC frees up the programmer from the burden of allocating and freeing up memory. Computers are fast and perfect at executing well-defined instructions. A computer is the perfect candidate when it comes to performing the task of memory management.

A non-GC language is justified when the project demands high-performance or has resource constraints. Examples include embedded software, desktop applications and 3D rendering.

Most projects don’t have these requirements. A static site generator written in Zig is not useful!

There is a specific person who likes non-GC languages. Someone who’s excited about hardware description languages and logic gates.

That’s not true for me. Using a non-GC language feels like going back in time. We might as well start keypunching The IBM 029.