On 26/06/2009, at 10:58 AM, Chris Idou wrote:
Bill.... I don't know if this was discussed before, but could you discuss the lack of GC on the iPhone?
I suspect it is for performance reasons. The Objective-C garbage collector is designed to run in a separate thread on the Mac, which means it can run on its own CPU core separate to the main thread.
In single-core systems, even on the Mac, performance of Garbage Collected code is very poor because the collector has to share CPU time with the main thread. When Xcode 3 (a GC app) was first released in the Leopard betas there were still quite a few people with single- CPU PowerPC laptops who found that Xcode could barely keep up with their typing. On dual-core machines it was fine.
The iPhone has a single-core CPU and a slow one at that, so while I am sure that GC could be turned on, it would probably make developers very unhappy.
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