On Tuesday, 29 August 2017 at 00:52:11 UTC, Cecil Ward wrote:
I am vacillating - considering breaking a lifetime's C habits
and letting the D garbage collector make life wonderful by just
cleaning up after me and ruining my future C disciple by not
deleting stuff myself.
The tsv command line tools I open-sourced haven't any problems
with GC. They are only one type of app, perhaps better suited to
GC than other apps, but still, it is a reasonable data point.
I've done rather extensive benchmarking against similar tools
written in native languages, mostly C. The D tools were faster,
often by significant margins. The important part is not that they
were faster on any particular benchmark, but that they did well
against a fair variety of tools written by a fair number of
different programmers, including several standard unix tools. The
tools were programmed using the standard library where possible,
without resorting to low-level optimizations.
I don't know if the exercise says anything about GC vs manual
memory management from the perspective of maximum possible code
optimization. But, I do think it is suggestive of benefits that
may occur in more regular programming, in that GC allows you to
spend more time on other aspects of your program, and less time
on memory management details.
That said, all the caveats, suggestions, etc. given by others in
this thread apply to my programs to. GC is hardly a free lunch.
Benchmarks on the tsv utilities:
https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils-dlang/blob/master/docs/Performance.md
Blog post describing some of the techniques used:
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/05/24/faster-command-line-tools-in-d/
--Jon
