[OT] Why mobile web apps are slow

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 10.07.2013 20:32, schrieb Jacob Carlborg:
> On 2013-07-10 19:25, Sean Kelly wrote:
>> On Jul 9, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote:
>>
>>> A bit off-topic, but well worth reading,
>>>
>>> http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/
>>
>> Oh, regarding ObjC (and I'll qualify this by saying that I'm not an
>> ObjC programmer).  My understanding is that ObjC was originally
>> reference counted (ARC = Automatic Reference Counting).  Apple then
>> introduced a mark & sweep GC for ObjC and then in the following
>> release deprecated it and switched back to ARC for reasons I don't
>> recall.  However, reference counting *is* garbage collection, despite
>> what that slide suggests.  It just behaves in a manner that tends to
>> spread the load out more evenly across the application lifetime.
>
> Objective-C originally used manual reference counting. Then Apple
> created a GC (never available on iOS). Then they implemented ARC in
> Clang. And now they have deprecated the GC and one should use ARC.
>

What sometimes goes missed between the lines is that one of the 
decisions to go ARC instead of GC, is because the Objective-C GC never
worked properly and ARC offers a better fit for the current state of
Objective-C world.

First of all, GC was an opt-in and very few libraries supported it.

Then we have the typical issues with a conservative GC in a C based 
language, which lead to tons of issues if one looks into developer forums.

This is, of course, not good PR to explain the real technical reason why
they decided to go ARC instead, was that the GC implementation was a 
failure.


--
Paulo