iPhone vs Android

[deadalnix via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 12 September 2016 at 22:57:23 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> This may be interpreted as follows: the iPhone uses native apps 
> with reference counting

I think the native part is fair, but the RC part maybe not. I 
know first hand that they have a fair amount of problem on the 
side.

> whereas the Android uses a virtual machine with tracing garbage 
> collection.

Dalvik's GC is truly horrible and Java is addicted to memory 
allocations, which makes it worse. A match made in hell.

> It follows that the latter needs more memory for the same 
> performance,
> and is more jerky in behavior than the former.

Putting a stop the world GC in a UI program is the worst idea 
ever. Doing this java is giving steroïd to the worse idea ever. I 
have no idea what Google was thnking here.

> Wondering to what extent this is true. If it is, that provides 
> more impetus for reference counting for D by the following 
> logic: (a) it is likely that in the future more code will run 
> on portable, battery-powered systems; (b) battery power does 
> not follow a Moore trajectory, so at this point in history 
> demand for battery lifetime is elastic.
>

RC itself is not panacea, it doesn't work well with exceptions, 
generate a huge amount of code bloat, hurt throughput, which you 
don't care in UI thread, but do care in the backend, and so on. 
But first and foremost, it is a disaster for shared data.

I stay convinced that an hybrid approach is inevitable and am 
surprised why few are going there (hello PHP, here is a thing you 
get right).