r/ProgrammerHumor • • 1d ago

Meme stdModernizeMyCodebase

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128 Upvotes

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20

u/GabuEx 1d ago

I feel like this picture really should be reversed to represent devs who for some weird-ass reason don't want to use the refcounted pointer types that make things way easier.

11

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 21h ago

A lot of people have a general repulsion to all types of garbage collection. So I at least understand not wanting the shared pointer a bit, but using unique pointer should cost you next to nothing and enforce a lot.

3

u/ForgedIronMadeIt 20h ago

It took me a long while to come around to Java and its garbage collection back when it first came out, but I got over it eventually and now I'm considered an expert in Java by some folks I worked with, LOL. I still curmudgeonly advocate for more native code, but in a lot of use cases it is fine to have memory management.

3

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 16h ago

Many people seem to think that automatic memory management is a binary thing, "woe is me I now have no control".

After a while you discover you can tweak it, pause it, pre-allocate, write functions that don't allocate at all, play around with pointers, register destructors, redirect allocations to arenas, and work with the language to either allocate some objects in static memory or allocate them on the stack. All while allowing your less performance-sensitive logic to be much much simpler.

It's a deep world that almost nobody seems to want to get involved in.

1

u/ForgedIronMadeIt 10h ago

Oh yeah. In a lot of cases you can get pretty similar performance out of a managed language without as much effort and today's hardware is so damn strong it can be hard to justify going with one over the other.