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Waste Management

Waste Management — cover art: a small badger groundskeeper in a tweed waistcoat raking a sea of small paper scraps in a Victorian courtyard, a wheelbarrow half-full beside him, several scraps held against a fence by a stuck hand-clip — warm honey light, cool indigo evening sky in the window of a stone wall, the badger's expression patient rather than overwhelmed. 👍

2004 · Drunken Blog Rants · Primer

“Some programmers view garbage collection as a license for unrestrained piggery. That's about as valid as assuming you're allowed to smear ketchup all over the walls of your hotel room just because they have a cleaning service.”
— From Waste Management, August 2004
Read the essay

© 2004 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Drunken Blog Rants.

Author’s note

You would think this article on garbage collection from 2004 would come across as dated. But surprisingly, GC is very much both under development and hotly debated, as it was over 20 years ago.

Nearly all languages that became popular after this post were, unsurprisingly, garbage collected, notably Golang, which was not created until three years after I posted this article. The real surprise is Rust, which has managed to keep the non-GC discussions relevant outside the niche industries like gaming where C++ still has a foothold.

The article is short, and funny in parts. I think it's still a pretty good read.

AI Notes

Triggered by two phone screens in close succession where candidates told Steve, in identical words, that C# means "you don't have to worry about memory." First, a defense of the abstraction: good garbage collectors, Steve argues, are following the same trajectory compilers followed thirty years earlier — quietly beating the people who insist on hand-managing. Then four ways a garbage-collected program buries itself anyway. Allocating too many objects (you can drown any collector if you treat allocation as free). Hard references to unused objects (the classic cache pattern; WeakHashMap and LinkedHashMap as the mitigations). Unreleased non-memory resources (file handles and DB connections in finalizers that never run; Java's finally as the right substitute for C++ stack-object cleanup). Untuned collectors (the JVM's knobs as something working engineers should read about).

The piece closes on two epigraphs Steve sets against each other: Ellis & Stroustrup ("C programmers think memory management is too important to be left to the computer; Lisp programmers think memory management is too important to be left to the user") and the Erik Naggum anecdote about Emacs feeling faster the day he removed the "Garbage collecting" status message.

Related listings

  • 2005

    Allocation Styles

    The successor essay seven months later. Waste Management argues GC is a real abstraction win; Allocation Styles uses that as the bottom rung of a six-style ladder up to query and pattern-matching.

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  • 2004

    Singleton Considered Stupid

    Same month, same author voice, complementary point. Singleton is about the C-with-namespaces habit hiding inside Java; Waste Management is about the C-with-malloc habit hiding inside C# and Java.

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  • 2005

    Practical Magic

    Same instinct — let the runtime do more, you do less, then learn the runtime well enough to know when not to. Practical Magic generalises what Waste Management applies to the GC specifically.

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