LinkedIn Article to be: Why you need to start moving off C/C++ to D, now.

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

Am 15.07.2014 22:58, schrieb deadalnix:
> On Tuesday, 15 July 2014 at 20:03:15 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> From the link above:
>>
>> "It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using shared
>> pointers in particular) is better than garbage collection. There is
>> actual research* showing that the two approaches are just two sides of
>> the same coin. You should realize that deleting a shared pointer may
>> lead to an arbitrary long pause in program execution, with similar
>> performance characteristics as a garbage sweep. It’s not only because
>> every serious reference counting algorithm must be able to deal with
>> cycles, but also because every time a reference count goes to zero on
>> a piece of data a whole graph of pointers reachable from that object
>> has to be traversed. A data structure built with shared pointers might
>> take a long time to delete and, except for simple cases, you’ll never
>> know which shared pointer will go out of scope last and trigger it."
>>
>> * http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf
>
> Yes but D's GC is crap. I actually wanted to a a quick hack in it
> recently to avoid going through the lock every time for every
> operation, but ended up giving up. Also the API between the GC
> and the compiler need to be reworked.

Which boils down to having to improve the GC implementation, not that GC 
in general is bad.


>
> Finally someone posted here a research paper from ibm if memory
> serve. It show that ref counting is a win for single threaded
> code, but is a net loose when sharing across thread, because of
> the synchronization overhead (especially the hammering of the
> cache line containing the reference count).


Which given the fact that most computers nowadays, even embedded ones, 
are becoming at very least dual core, is quite important fact.

--
Paulo