> The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games, stopping the world is something you can't really afford to do.
I love this opinion from games programmers because they never qualify it and talk about what their latency budgets are and what they do in lieu of a garbage collector. They just hand wave and say "GC can't work". The reality is you still have to free resources, so it's not like the garbage collector is doing work that doesn't need to be done. What latency budgets are you working with? How often do you do work to free resources? What are the latency requirements there? Even at 144 fps, that's 7ms per frame. If you have a garbage collector that runs in 200us, you could run a GC on every single frame and use less than 3% of your frame budget on the GC pause. I'm -not- suggesting that running a GC on every frame is a good idea or that it should be done, but what I find so deeply frustrating is that the argument that GC can't work in a game engine is never qualified.
edit: wow for once the replies are actually good, very pleased with this discussion.
People went to extreme measures to avoid allocating memory in their games: manually pooling every in-game object & particle, not using string comparisons in C#, etc https://danielilett.com/2019-08-05-unity-tips-1-garbage-coll...
Unity itself finally has a new system they're previewing to average out the GC spikes over time, so a game, say, never drops below 60fps: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-increme...
As well, there is a new way of writing C# code for Unity called ECS that will avoid producing GC sweeps https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/man...