iPhone vs Android

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, September 13, 2016 03:58:50 Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 9/12/2016 4:21 PM, deadalnix wrote:
> > 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).
>
> Interestingly, Warp (the C preprocessor I developed in D) used a hybrid
> approach. The performance critical code was all hand-managed, while the rest
> was GC'd.

Folks have posted here before about taking that approach with games and the
like that they've written. In a number cases, simply being careful about
specific pieces of code and avoiding the GC in those cases was enough to get
the required performance. In some cases, simply disabling the GC during a
critical piece of code and re-enabling it afterwards fixes the performance
problems trigged by the GC without even needing manual memory management or
RC. In others, making sure that the critical thread (e.g. the rendering
thread) was not GC-managed while letting the rest of the app us the GC
takes care of the problem.

We need reference counting to solve certain problems (e.g. cases where
deterministic destruction of stuff on the heap is required), but other stuff
(like array slices) work far better with a GC. So going either full-on RC or
full-on GC is not going to be good move for most programs. I don't think
that there's any question that we'll be best off by having both as solid
options, and best practices can develop as to when to use one or the other.

- Jonathan M Davis