Use of a GC does not imply we are trying to avoid memory management or no longer have a say in how memory is utilized. Getting sweaty chasing around esoteric memory management strategies leads to poor designs, not good ones.
> Getting sweaty chasing around esoteric memory management strategies
I’m advocating learning about, and understanding a couple different allocation strategies and simplifying everything by doing away with the GC and minimizing the abstractions you need.
My guess is this stuff used to be harder, but it’s now much easier with the languages and knowledge we have available. Even for application development.
Arenas are fantastic when they work; when they don't, you're in a place that's neither simple nor particularly efficient.
Generational tracing garbage collectors automatically work in a manner similar to arenas (sometimes worse; sometimes better) in the young-gen, but they also automatically promote the non-arena-friendly objects to the old-gen. Modern GCs - which are constantly evolving at a pretty fast pace - use algorithms that reprensent a lot of expertise gathered in the memory management space that's hard to beat unless arenas fully solve your needs.
