I always took GC for granted until I started coding in Zig more and had to worry about managing my own memory.
One thing that Zig made pretty easy that's been sort of my go-to is using Arena allocations a lot more. It's pretty frequent that for a chunk of code I know I'll be allocating some chunk of memory and working with it, but then once that's finished I won't need it anymore. So just throwing everything into the arena and then freeing the arena afterwards works great, is fast, and is simple.
Are there any garbage collectors that enable this sort of thing? I think it might be vaguely like "generations", but I think even those are inferred and kept track of in greater detail to know when to move between the generations. I'm thinking of somehow earmarking a scope to use its own bit of memory and to not worry about collecting within the scope, and then when you leave the scope being able to free it all.
I'm sure there's more complexities that I'm missing. It's just that dealing with memory manually really makes you realize that the programmer probably easily knows expected lifetimes better than can be inferred. The only GC's I've used have been all "don't worry about memory we'll figure out everything". But maybe you could provide hints or something.
One thing that Zig made pretty easy that's been sort of my go-to is using Arena allocations a lot more. It's pretty frequent that for a chunk of code I know I'll be allocating some chunk of memory and working with it, but then once that's finished I won't need it anymore. So just throwing everything into the arena and then freeing the arena afterwards works great, is fast, and is simple.
Are there any garbage collectors that enable this sort of thing? I think it might be vaguely like "generations", but I think even those are inferred and kept track of in greater detail to know when to move between the generations. I'm thinking of somehow earmarking a scope to use its own bit of memory and to not worry about collecting within the scope, and then when you leave the scope being able to free it all.
I'm sure there's more complexities that I'm missing. It's just that dealing with memory manually really makes you realize that the programmer probably easily knows expected lifetimes better than can be inferred. The only GC's I've used have been all "don't worry about memory we'll figure out everything". But maybe you could provide hints or something.