Why I Like D

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 13 January 2022 at 10:21:12 UTC, Stanislav Blinov 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 January 2022 at 16:17:02 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Oh there is a psychological barrier for sure. On both sides of 
> the, uh, "argument". I've said this before but I can repeat it 
> again: time it. 4 milliseconds. That's how long a single 
> GC.collect() takes on my machine. That's a quarter of a frame. 
> And that's a dry run. Doesn't matter if you can GC.disable or 
> not, eventually you'll have to collect, so you're paying that 
> cost (more, actually, since that's not going to be a dry run). 
> If you can afford that - you can befriend the GC. If not - GC 
> goes out the window.
>
> In other words, it's only acceptable if you have natural pauses 
> (loading screens, transitions, etc.) with limited resource 
> consumption between them OR if you can afford to e.g. halve 
> your FPS for a while. The alternative is to collect every 
> frame, which means sacrificing a quarter of runtime. No, thanks.
>
> Thing is, "limited resource consumption" means you're 
> preallocating anyway, at which point one has to question why 
> use the GC in the first place. The majority of garbage created 
> per frame can be trivially allocated from an arena and 
> "deallocated" in one `mov` instruction (or a few of them). And 
> things that can't be allocated in an arena, i.e. things with 
> destructors - you *can't* reliably delegate to the GC anyway - 
> which means your persistent state is more likely to be manually 
> managed.
>
> TLDR: it's pointless to lament on irrelevant trivia. Time it! 
> Any counter-arguments from either side are pointless without 
> that.

You collect it when it matters less, like loading a level, some 
of them take so long that people even have written mini-games 
that play during loading scenes, they won't notice a couple of ms 
more.

Hardly any different from having an arena throw away the whole 
set of frame data during loading.

Unless we start talking about DirectStorage and similar.