I keep bringing this issues, because I am a firm believer that
when
people that fight against a GC are just fighting a lost battle.
Like back in the 80's people were fighting against Pascal or C
versus
Assembly. Or in the 90' were fighting against C++ versus C.
Now C++ is even used for operating systems, BeOS, Mac OS X
drivers,
COM/WinRT.
Sure a systems programming language needs some form of manual
memory
management for "exceptional situations", but 90% of the time you
will
be allocating either referenced counted or GCed memory.
What will you do when the major OS use a systems programming
language like forces GC or reference counting on you do? Which is
already slowly happening with GC and ARC on Mac OS X, WinRT on
Windows 8, mainstream OS, as well as the Oberon, Spin, Mirage,
Home, Inferno and Singularity research OSs.
Create your own language to allow you to live in the past?
People that refuse to adapt to times stay behind, those who
adapt, find ways to profit from the new reality.
But as I said before, that is my opinion and as a simple human is
also prone to errors. Maybe my ideas regarding memory management
in systems languages are plain wrong, the future will tell.
--
Paulo
On Monday, 27 February 2012 at 04:17:24 UTC, Andrew Wiley wrote:
On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Paulo Pinto
<pj...@progtools.org> wrote:
Am 26.02.2012 17:34, schrieb so:
On Sunday, 26 February 2012 at 15:58:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Would this even be an issue on multicore systems where the
GC can run
concurrently? As long as the stop-the-world parts are below
some given
threshold.
If it is possible to guarantee that i don't think anyone
would bother
with manual MM.
Well, some game studios seem to be quite happy with XNA, which
implies using
a GC:
http://infinite-flight.com/if/index.html
I don't really see why you keep bringing up these examples.
This is a
performance issue, which means you can certainly ignore it and
things
will still work, just not as well. I've seen 3d games in Java,
but
they always suffer from an awkward pause at fairly regular
intervals.
This is why the AAA shops are still writing most of the engines
in
C++.
You will always be able to find examples of developers that
simply
chose to ignore the issue for one reason or another.
To make it clear, I'm not trying to antagonize you here. I
agree that
GC is in general a superior technical solution to manual memory
management, and given the research going into GC technology,
I'm sure
that long term it's probably a good idea.
However, I disagree with your statement that "the main issue is
that
the GC needs to be optimized, not that manual memory management
is
required."
Making a GC that can run fast enough to make this sort of thing
a
non-issue is currently so hard that it can only be used in
certain
niche situations. That will probably change, but it will
probably
change over the course of several years. Manual memory
management,
however, is here now and dead simple to use so long as the
programmer
understands the semantics. Programming in that model is harder,
but
not nearly as bad as, say, thread-based concurrency with race
conditions and deadlock. Manual memory management is much
simpler to
deal with than many other things programmers already take on
voluntarily.
When you want your realtime application to behave in a certain
way,
would you rather spend months or years working on the GC and
program
in a completely difficult style to deal with the issue, or use
manual
memory management *now* and deal with the slightly more
difficult
programming model? Cost/benefit wise, GC just doesn't make a
lot of
sense in this sort of scenario unless you have a lot of
resources to
burn or a specific reason to choose a GC-mandatory platform.
Again, I'm not saying GC is bad, I'm saying that in this area,
the
cost/benefit ratio doesn't say you should spend your time
improving
the GC to make things work. For everyone else, GC is great, and
I
applaud David Simcha's efforts to improve D's GC performance.
