[llmslave3]

I hate to say it, but this probably would not have happened in a garbage collected language.

GC languages are fast these days. If you don't want a runtime like C# (which has excellent performance) a language like Go would have worked just fine here, compiling to a small native binary but with a GC.

I don't really understand the aversion to GC's. In memory constrained scenarios or where performance is an absolute top priority, I understand wanting manual control. But that seems like a very rare scenario in user space.

[surajrmal]

Why do you think trippling the memory usage of a program is an acceptable tradeoff? It's not just GC pauses that are problematic with gc languages. Some software wants to run on systems with less than 4GiB of RAM.

[p-e-w]

I agree that garbage collection is fine and Go indeed has an amazing garbage collector. Unfortunately, it also has the worst type system of all mainstream languages created in the 21st century, so the benefits are rarely worth the drawbacks.

[llmslave3]

Go's type system is fine. This kind of comment is just pointless and goes against HN rules.