What does HackerNews think of gc?
Branch of the spec repo scoped to discussion of GC integration in WebAssembly
Language:
WebAssembly
Option 1 - Webassembly without a built-in garbage collector - exists today. You can compile Go or C# to WASM today, and it will output a WASM module with an embedded garbage collector.
There's a draft proposal to add a built in garbage collector (option 2) to WASM. I have no idea what the current status is - maybe someone involved can chime in. I suspect some version of the WASM GC spec will land eventually.
When it does, languages like Go, C# and Java should start to become competitive with javascript as frontend web languages.
I assume that's one of the parts of the work done at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc - not happening any soon yet, but it'll eventually be done.
Not sure why, but some links in the article seem to be missing, for example one to the draft GC spec for WebAssembly (which should probably link to https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc).
Actually, Wasm goes into the direction you are pointing. A Wasm runtime should add a little overhead to the requirements of the Wasm module.
However, it's true Wasm is not on that point yet. There are open threads about deallocate Wasm memory [1]. However, I expect these features, as well as Garbage Collection [2] will come to the stardard over time. This will allow modules and runtimes to properly manage memory usage.