alt Hacker NewsI am particularly interested in the rapid and steady growth of "garbage", among rubbish, trash and junk. What does this indicate? An evolution of English?
Replies
shakna • 06/16/2025
A mindless grep. It's probably picking up the massive amount of effort that has gone into link-time garbage collection, and socket inflight garbage, and so many, many others.
TheSilva • 06/16/2025
Given that it started appearing in 1995, I will assume it is because of the influence of the movie Hackers in the developers of the kernel source.
inopinatus • 06/16/2025
The GPU access ring buffer aka GARB is expired after a set duration i.e. when garb_age exceeds the garb_age_dump value.
mlok • 06/16/2025
The band Garbage became popular around 1995. Would be interesting to look for any correlation.
mcosta • 06/16/2025
Some kind Garbage Collection inside the kernel?
AFAICT the consensus is to say that an uninitialized variable (eg. int i;) has "garbage value". I'd say it's rather a technical term than profanity.