jl777 wrote:
why not have the way you allocate the memory determined how it behaves?
In a garbage collected (GC) language such as JavaScript, you don't actually ever explicitly allocate and deallocate memory. Thus we avoid the bug of crashing when a pointer points to memory that has already been freed, or the memory leaks due to forgetting to deallocate memory. GC languages can still have semantic memory leaks though, such as forgetting to remove an event handler. Automatic reference counting pointers have the flaw that they memory leak where there is a circular reference (pointer points to some structure which contains a pointer which points back to the struct that contains the first pointer).
So GC is much easier for the programmer than manually tracking memory allocation and deallocation. But it has one disadvantage which is that it requires up to 5X the memory to achieve the same performance, and the mark-and-sweep pauses can lockup the machine for many seconds. There are ways to improve the GC. The m
