Rainer Deyke wrote:
Christopher Wright wrote:
I was pulling numbers out of my ass.
That's what I assumed. I'm a game developer. I use GC.
0.1 seconds out of every ten is a small amount to pay for the benefits
of garbage collection in most situations.
GC is useless for resource management. RAII solves the resource
management problem, in C++ and D2. GC is a performance optimization on
top of that. If the GC isn't faster than simple reference counting,
then it serves no purpose, because you could use RAII with reference
counting for the same effect.
(No, I don't consider circular references a problem worth discussing.)
I believe Python is using reference counting with a garbage collector,
with the collector intended to solve the circular reference problem, so
apparently Guido van Rossum thinks it's a problem worth discussing.
And my opinion of reference counting is, if it requires no programmer
intervention, it's just another garbage collector. Reference counting
would probably be a win overall if a reference count going to zero would
only optionally trigger a collection -- you're eliminating the 'mark'
out of 'mark and sweep'. Though I would still demand a full
mark-and-sweep, just not as often. Nontrivial data structures nearly
always have circular references.
