From: Drew Crawford Subject: Re: On "Why mobile web apps are slow" To: Taylan Ulrich B. Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 20:22:22 -0500 (1 day, 16 hours, 55 minutes ago) I share your concern for the level of discussion, although perhaps for different reasons. I will only bother responding to one point, as it is the one that you seemed to take the greatest offense to, and your reaction was largely unintelligible to me: It is what garbage collectors do, by definition, to collect objects which they can *prove* to be no longer accessible. The halting problem only has implications on static analysis, which is the entire reason garbage-collection is a run-time feature, unlike for example ARC which works through static analysis only and thus cannot break cyclic references that appear at run-time. So it looks like you're unaware of the fundamental workings of garbage-collection, yet write a whole article on it and pretend to be smart. I was hoping that even the most blatant mistakes in your article are due to the unintentional cherry-picking and blindness induced by your bias regarding this topic, but comes out it's nothing else than ignorance. A proof of my position is given in Morrisett, Felleisen, and Harper's "Abstract Models of Memory Management" as Proposition 3.4. Although I am quite certain the proof is much older; it is the sort of thing that anyone with a solid grasp of computation theory would be able to see in a few minutes. We are faced with some possibilities here. Either it is the case that Morrisett, Felleisen, and Harper are incorrect, which I think can be rejected out of hand. Then there is I think the most generous outcome for you in which you misunderstand my statement to be something other than Proposition 3.4, and so perhaps "my" position (which is of course your misunderstanding of my position rather than my actual position) might indeed be a very ignorant position, but that is hardly my fault. Finally there is the possibility that you have correctly understood my claim and are just incorrect on the logic. Whichever case we are in, this is not the time for personal attacks. Well, it is never time for personal attacks, so it is bad for that reason, no matter what sort of silly argument I have presented. But it is especially not time for personal attacks when the position has both a formal proof behind it and the support of respected scholars. It would be the time to mount a very serious argument on the merits, that would require a great deal of best effort, and even then given the level of opposing support is realistically likely to fail. But instead you definitely doubled down on your bet that I am an ignorant person. Which I probably am, so it isn't a bad bet; but the position in question is certainly not ignorant (cf. it has both a proof and academic support), so that fact is not particularly relevant to the question. At any rate, we seem to have a pretty fundamental disconnect about how to have a proper argument. Certainly further discussion on the topic of garbage collectors is not going to shed any light on that problem.