On Thursday, 17 April 2014 at 19:55:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I know that with ARC the compiler inserts the code for you. That doesn't make it costless.
No, but Objective-C has some overhead to begin with, so it matters less. Cocoa is a very powerful framework that will do most of the weight-lifting for you, kinda like a swiss army knife. In the same league as Python. Slow high level, a variety of highly optimized C functions under the hood. IMHO Python and Objective-C wouldn't stand a chance without their libraries.
I know it's done automatically. But you might be horrified at what the generated code looks like.
Apple has put a lot of resources into ARC. How much slower than manual RC varies, some claim as little as 10%, others 30%, 50%, 100%. In that sense it is proof-of-concept. It is worse, but not a lot worse than manual ref counting if you have a compiler that does a very good job of it.
But compiled Objective-C code looks "horrible" to begin with… so I am not sure how well that translates to D.
