Agreed, however there is also a reason why the best ones also pack multiple GC algorithms, like in Java and .NET, because one approach doesn't fit all workloads.
Agreed, however there is also a reason why the best ones also pack multiple GC algorithms, like in Java and .NET, because one approach doesn't fit all workloads.
Then there’s perl, which doesn’t free at all.
Perl frees memory. It uses refcounting, so you need to break heap cycles or it will leak.
(99% of the time, I find this less problematic than Java’s approach, fwiw).
Freedom is overrated... :P
doesn't java also?
I heard that was a common complaint for minecraft
What do you mean - if Java returns memory to the OS? Which one - Java heap of the malloc/free by the JVM?
Java is pretty greedy with the memory it claims. Especially historically it was pretty hard to get the JVM to release memory back to the OS.
To an outsider, that looks like the JVM heap just steadily growing, which is easy to mistake for a memory leak.
> Especially historically it was pretty hard to get the JVM to release memory back to the OS.
This feels like a huge understatement. I still have some PTSD around when I did Java professionally between like 2005 and 2014.
The early part of that was particularly horrible.
This only really ends up being a problem on windows. On systems with proper virtual memory setups, the cost of unused memory is very low (since the the OS can just page it out)
Java has a quite strict max heap setting, it's very uncommon to let it allocate up to 25% of the system memory (the default). It won't grow past that point, though.
Baring bugs/native leaks - Java has a very predictable memory allocation.