On Saturday, 22 August 2015 at 09:16:32 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Sat, 2015-08-22 at 07:30 +0000, rsw0x via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
[…]
because Go is not a general purpose language.
Not entirely true. Go is a general purpose language, it is a
successor to C as envisioned by Rob Pike, Russ Cox, and others
(I am not sure how much input Brian Kernighan has had).
However, because of current traction in Web servers and general
networking, it is clear that that is where the bulk of the
libraries are. Canonical also use it for Qt UI applications. I
am not sure of Google real intent for Go on Android, but there
is one.
A concurrent GC for D would kill D. Go programs saw a 25-50%
performance decrease across the board for the lower latencies.
They also saw a 100% increase in performance when it was
rewritten, and a 20% fall with this latest rewrite. I
anticipate great improvement for the 1.6 rewrite. I am
surprised they are retaining having only a single garbage
collector: different usages generally require different garbage
collection strategies. Having said that Java is moving from
having four collectors, to having one, it is going to be
interesting to see if G1 meets the needs of all JVM usages.
D could make some very minor changes and be capable of a
per-thread GC with none of these performance drawbacks, but
nobody seems very interested in it.
Until some organization properly funds a suite of garbage
collectors for different performance targets, you have what
there is.
I didn't mean to start again the whole GC and Go vs D thing.
Just that one ought to know the lay of the land as it develops.
Out of curiosity, how much funding is required to develop the
more straightforward kind of GCs ? Or to take what's been done
and make it possible for others to use? It needn't be a single
organisation I would think if there are many that would benefit
and one doesn't get bogged down in a mentality of people worrying
about possibly spurious free rider problems. Since the D
Foundation seems under way, it seems worth asking the question
first and thinking about goals without worrying for now about
what seems realistic.
