The op is talking about compacting GCs and Go's isn't a compacting one.
Go's GC is a variation of a regular mark and sweep GC: the GC starts exploring the heap to find all reachable memory, and then clears the unreachable one, meanwhile compacting GCs move the reachable memory from one place (the “from space”) to another (the “to space”), which become the new heap. Theses two garbage collectors famillies are completely different.
And I was talking about GCs overall. The point was that Go's GC is pretty much the best GC out there used in major projects, designed to try to compete with systems programming languages and come as closely as possible to it. A lot of money has been put to make it as fast and deterministic as possible. It does not mean it is the latest in research, of course.
This is a real misunderstanding. Go's GC is not “pretty much the best GC out there” by most GC standards (it's already quite good and keeps getting better, though). And it hasn't been “designed to try to compete with systems programming languages”.
Go as a language was designed like that, and special attention was made to allow as much value types as possible, to allocate as much things as you can on the stack, thus reducing GC pressure. For the first five years of Go or something, Go's GC was actually pretty bad (it was probably the most basic GC you could find in any somewhat popular language), but it wasn't too much of a deal because you can avoid it most of the time when it goes in your way (much more easily than in Java for instance).
After some time, they decided to enhance it, but they were on a budget (no lots of money spent on it” actually), so because in go you can avoid allocating memory on the heap, they decided to focus on GC latency instead of throughput (if the GC's throughput isn't good enough for you, you better reduce your allocations).
Overall go is a pretty fast language, and it's an engineering success, but it's in spite of its GC and thanks to other parts of the language's design, not because Go's GC is exceptionally good (it's not, and if you read my link you'd understand how).
Thanks for the answer. I guess I have been misled, since Go proponents (including in HN) always argue the latest iteration sof their GC (which was discussed a few times here) had one of the lowest latencies of most production languages; and that is what made it suitable for many tasks.
Since I don’t have a sense on the timescales, I will take your word for it that it was the reverse.
Oh please. I've used Windows since 2000, and have seen lots of commercial C++ software (games, editors, Windows itself) give me that characteristic sound and dialog box. I stopped using Plasma desktop and KDE because of the crashes. "Error. Memory could not be written", segmentation fault, DLL error - I naively thought these were an inevitable consequence of using a computer, until I realized that the problem was that all this software was written in C++.
2. Windows was (is?) not coded in modern C++ but a bastard C or very old C++ from what I understand. Bugs were also mainly by third-party drivers and software. The industry for home user software had very bad quality, that’s is true, but that had nothing to do with C++. C, Fortran, Delphi and others were used too.
3. Videogames are in an industry where deadlines are more important than bugs and companies really don’t care about fixing stuff before release.
Do not mix up vulnerabilities (security) with normal usage (generally buggy SW), which is what I talked about. I explicitly called out vulnerabilities as the actual problem that calls for safe languages.
For instance, you can have a library that works perfectly for any non-malicious/valid PNG image, yet have vulnerabilities for invalid, crafted files.
In fact, this is almost always the case for any product. Only really bad quality software has issues with the happy expected path. But many more will have vulnerabilities in the unexpected paths.
Why the "commercial"? Are other software types not worthy to be considered in this? Are open source non-commercial projects inherently worse code and more crashy? Should we not look at all kinds of software, when talking about programming languages in general?
It has been my experience, that even the well known softwares written in C (not sure about C++) are indeed kind of crashy. Example: Open Broadcast Studio, used by many people to stream on various platforms. It is possible there to go into the settings and change them so that OBS crashes and cannot be restarted again, unless you guess, that the configuration is faulty and OBS is unable to deal with a faulty config. You can only get it to run again by removing the config or reinstalling. Great quality. VLC is another example of such crashy software. Not only did it crash many times in the past, but also cannot properly deal with unplayable files in a looping playlist and will simply bring all your cores to 100% usage.
So far some anecdotes from the well known C software world. I am not sure, whether the people in the respective community consider these softwares to be good quality.
Apart from maybe seL4 (which I only know by reputation, and was translated from a formally verified spec) I can't name any software that I would call reliable. If we ever want computers to actually work, the whole stack needs to be flensed down to the metal and replaced, and I hope Rust is the language to do it with.
Please don’t spread FUD. The majority of commercial C++ software out there is rock solid.
Vulnerabilities are the actual problem in today's Internet connected world and why Rust has grown so fast.
As for GCs: they are not good enough for some fields, so they cannot be used. Even state of the art ones like Go's.