> On 2022-11-26, at 9:37 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  a new instance is initialized; it doesn't contain random crap.

This is a really, really, important fact that gets far too little appreciation. We (as in those of us that have done significant amounts of living in the bowels of VM implementations) had to put non-trivial effort into making that happen correctly and efficiently, because in the Olden Times (when computers did maybe one million instructions a second if you could afford a professional workstation class machine) it was *painful* to spend that time and we had to cheat in creative ways. The pay-off is that we get to not worry about the potential for horrifying things happening in the way it can with so many other programming systems. It makes garbage collection more practical, which in turn makes other parts of programming life nicer.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- If she was any dumber, she'd be a green plant.