This is the one HN post that I agree with above all others. I also thought I was in a small majority holding this view. I recall being told 15 years ago that I was "a dinosaur" for being skeptical about GC. I'm now a black-belt JVM GC tuner but that has only served to confirm my feelings about GC. You're exchanging the solution of some albeit tricky problems for the acquisition new much worse problems (pauses, inability to reason about memory usage).
Why do you think GC makes you unable to reason about memory usage? It's certainly possible to write code where ownership/lifetimes are extremely unclear, and I've cursed code like that before, but that's not the same as making it impossible to reason about memory usage.
> I recall being told 15 years ago that I was "a dinosaur" for being skeptical about GC.
15 years ago we neither had today's GCs nor today's alternative solutions. Whatever informed your gut feelings back then might not really be all that relevant today.
For all the praise Rust gets, its advanced ownership model is fairly new in anything that even remotely approaches a mainstream language.
