Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Adam Wilson]

On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 23:05:35 -0800, Eric Suen <eric.suen.tech at gmail.com>  
wrote:

>
> "Ola Fosheim Gr?stad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>"> On  
> Tuesday, 4 February 2014 at 00:49:04 UTC, Adam Wilson
> wrote:
>>> Ahem. Wrong. See: WinForms, WPF, Silverlight. All extremely successful  
>>> GUI toolkits that are not known for GC related
>>> problems. I've been working with WPF since 2005, I can say the biggest  
>>> performance problem with it by far is the
>>> naive rendering of rounded corners, the GC has NEVER caused a hitch.
>>
>> According to Wikipedia:
>>
>> ?While the majority of WPF is in managed code, the composition engine  
>> which renders the WPF applications is a native
>> component. It is named Media Integration Layer (MIL) and resides in  
>> milcore.dll. It interfaces directly with DirectX
>> and provides basic support for 2D and 3D surfaces, timer-controlled  
>> manipulation of contents of a surface with a view
>> to exposing animation constructs at a higher level, and compositing the  
>> individual elements of a WPF application into
>> a final 3D "scene" that represents the UI of the application and  
>> renders it to the screen.?
>>
>> So, Microsoft does not think that GC is suitable for real time  
>> interactive graphics. And they are right.
>
> As long as other code is in managed code, there is GC running at
>  background, no matter your code write in whatever high performance
> language, it will be affect by GC anyway.  so that "So, Microsoft does
> not think that GC is suitable for real time > interactive graphics.
> And they are right." is only your opinion. you don't know the real reason
> behind MS's decision. some resource need release ASAP, so you can't
> rely on GC. or maybe bacause of overhead when call low API in managed
> code.
>

Actually the reason is that DirectX is a specialized Native COM-Like API  
that is NOT compatible with normal COM and therefore not compatible with  
.NET COM Interop. Milcore is a low-level immediate API. Most of the  
legwork in WPF is done in managed code. And yes, the GC would effect the  
performance regardless of whether or not the rendering API is native  
because so much of WPF is managed code.

-- 
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator