[fpc-pascal] Fwd: What to do to get new users

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2024, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:

> On Oct 17, 2024 at 12:03:47 AM, Guillermo Martínez Jiménez via fpc-pascal <
> fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>> Prease DON'T add garbage collector.  IMO it isn't a good idea.  I had
>> very bad experiences with it. Unless somebody found a new magic
>> algorithm in the last decade...
>>
>
> I used C# for Unity quite a bit and never had any problems. That’s even
> with the worst case scenario for game developing that needs real time
> graphics. Does that power all of .NET too and all those desktop
> applications? It’s been battle tested many years as far as I can tell.
>
> In 2024 you don’t need the performance of manual memory management in UI
> apps. Garbage collector or anything else will work perfectly well.

I don't write UI apps, only server apps. 
Performance matters there, so a GC is not good. 
We see this at times in our servers, when the GC kicks in; everything just stops.

In each case, it is a bad idea to slap this on an existing language:

a GC collected language is a complete paradigm shift from non-GC.
C# and Java (and probably others) were designed with GC in mind. 
That it works there is therefore not surprising.

By contrast, Pascal is not designed with GC in mind.
You'd need to redesign the language.

If you do that, you can throw away all existing code if you introduce GC, 
because the two concepts do not merge easily.

Embarcadero tried it in Delphi, and they failed. Not surprisingly,
they removed again all automatic memory management.

Michael.