Well, Today I Learned that Racket is GCed; I assumed the contrary due to John Carmack being enthusiast about it in the context of video games.

I understand the fact that not everything in a game belongs to the critical 16ms budget (and know about e.g. Unity, which lets you talk C# to it), but I'm still puzzled; can someone expand on:

- Which are these non critical parts? Rendering / physics / animation are certainly in the critical path. That leaves only simple "client" game logic out of it, right? What else?

- For these non critical parts, what are the typical acceptable time boundaries? For example, the article mentions "maximal latencies of around 22ms" for Racket. How is it acceptable for non-critical-path parts? How much would still be acceptable? 50ms? 100ms? "That depends"?

- And regarding Haskell and OCaml, which I only vaguely know about, I had never asked myself how they handle memory. Which makes me ask: are there non-GCed functional programming languages? Does it make sense? (Especially given the kinds of deep complex data structures produced by the immutability that often comes with these languages.)

> Well, Today I Learned that Racket is GCed

I'm curious how did you expect Racket to work without a GC or any Lisp like language for that matter or did you just assume because of video game usage?

> - And regarding Haskell and OCaml, which I only vaguely know about, I had never asked myself how they handle memory. Which makes me ask: are there non-GCed functional programming languages? Does it make sense? (Especially given the kinds of deep complex data structures produced by immutability.)

Rust and C++ depending on your definition of FP. I believe there are some old ML languages as well (and even some old lisps).

Am I misreading something? The first half of your comment seems to suggest that no lisp language could work without a CG, while the second half suggest there're some lisp languages that do.

Because I don't know how modern Lisps can do it (I believe there was hardware like lisp machines made specifically for Lisp that would deal or help with memory allocation/reuse as well as some code generation).

I honestly was curious if the OP had some insight that I did not. I realize re-reading the comment it sounds snide but I didn't want to assume the OP's knowledge.

For all I knew Racket could have some ability to avoid GC.