On Tuesday, 8 October 2013 at 23:05:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 10/8/2013 12:34 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I think that it's clear that for some projects, it's critical
to minimize the
GC, and I think that it's clear that we need to do a better
job of supporting
the folks who want to minimize GC usage, but I also think that
for the vast
majority of cases, complaints about the GC are way overblown.
It becomes an
issue when you're doing a lot of heap allocations, but it's
frequently easy to
design D code so that heap allocations are relatively rare
such that they
aren't going to be a serious problem outside of code which is
performance
critical to the point that it would be worrying about the cost
of malloc
(which most code isn't). Personally, the only time that I've
run into issues
with the GC is when trying to do use RedBlackTree with a lot
of items. That
has a tendancy to tank performance.
So, yes, it's problem. Yes, we need to improve the situaton.
But for most
situations, I think that the concern about the GC is way
overblown.
+1
Some years ago, a colleague of mine moonlighted teaching
remedial algebra at the UW. She'd write on the board:
x + 2 = 5
and call on a student to "solve for x". The student would
collapse in a stuttering heap of jelly, emitting sparks and
smoke like a Star Trek computer. She discovered that if she
wrote instead:
_ + 2 = 5
and would ask the same student what goes in the blank spot,
he'd say "3" without hesitation.
In other words, the student would only see the words "solve",
"x", and "algebra" which were a shortcut in his brain to "I
can't do this" and "gee math is hard." She found she was a far
more effective teacher by avoiding using those words.
I realized the same thing was happening with the word
"template". I talked Andrei into avoiding all use of that word
in "The D Programming Language", figuring that we could get
people who were terrified of "templates" to use them
successfully without realizing it (and I think this was very
successful).
We have a similar problem with "GC". People hear that word, and
they are instantly turned off. No amount of education will
change that. We simply have to find a better way to deal with
this issue.
You remind me of a well-known Chinese fable.
At the time when Fan, a nobleman of the state of Jin, became a
fugitive, a commoner found a bell and wanted to carry it off on
his back. But the bell was too big for him. When he tried to
knock it into pieces with a hammer there was a loud clanging
sound. He was afraid that someone will hear the noise and take
the bell from him, so he immediately stopped his own ears.
To worry about other people hearing the noise is understandable,
but to worry about himself hearing the noise (as if stopping his
own ears would prevent other people from hearing) is absurd.
