Java > Scala

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/02/2011 07:02 PM, Somedude wrote:
> Le 01/12/2011 12:26, Regan Heath a écrit :
>> On Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:04:13 -0000, Timon Gehr<timon.gehr at gmx.ch>  wrote:
>>
>>> The quite common claim that you cannot use Phobos without cluttering
>>> up all your code with allocations is just not true. Phobos is not an
>>> Object-oriented class library. There are seldom hidden allocations,
>>> and it is almost always obvious when allocations must happen. The most
>>> useful high-level features of D are compile time features that do not
>>> harm performance (on the contrary).
>>
>> But, it is true you cannot use the ~ operator on strings without
>> involving the GC, right?
>>
>> Maybe this isn't a problem for people who want to manually manage memory
>> for performance reasons but it is right at the very lowest levels of
>> "what is D" and it seems like something where it should be possible to
>> choose how the memory for a string is allocated etc.
>>
>> R
>>
> OTOH, string concatenation is not the most critical thing for game
> writers, is it ?
> I would see it more likely in XML parsing libraries, but D is already
> the fastest performer in this area (but maybe it could be faster without
> GC ?).

I would claim that it is fast there mainly because of the combination of 
humble dependence on GC and array slicing. Array slicing is a lot less 
powerful without any GC support. (of course, the particular way the 
parser is implemented matters a huge lot. The soon-to-be replaced 
std.xml module does not hold a candle to Tango's XML parsers, 
performance-wise.)