The Evils of Non-native Programming - Ep 7 - Jeff and Casey Show 2013

How to manage memory? Hi! I have mostly used garbage-collected languages so far. I'm learning C, and to me manual memory management looks hard. The fundamental problem to me, it seems, is that sometimes it's not clear who (i.e. what part of the program, but I'm anthropomorphizing) is responsible for freeing the memory. Say you are writing a game, or something like that. And there are several subsystems in the game: a model with logic and data, a graphics subsystem, a sound subsystem, a persistent storage subsystem, etc. And imagine one subsystem allocates some memory, and hands it out to the other subsystems to do stuff with. Say the model allocates memory to hold a new character in the g…

There are some good coments on the Hacker News thread about performance. C++ still reigns supreme in AAA game development (while Unity uses C# for user-land, Unity itself is written in C++), and for good reason. Games typically require tight interaction with the operating system and drivers (esp. GPU), both of which are still written in C or C++. See also, although Casey Muratori can definitely be dogmatic about such things. No matter what memory management scheme you choose, the programmer must do some work: - C requires careful use of `free()` to prevent leaks, and over-use of `malloc()` can become a performance drain. Tools like Valgrind can quickly find memory leaks, but it is anoth…