bearophile wrote:
Tony:
Walter Bright:
1. GC programs can be faster 2. GC programs can use less memory
3. GC programs can be guaranteed to be memory safe 4. GC programs
are faster to develop and have fewer bugs
So even taking into account that Walter's experience on such topics
is far greater than mine (I've never written a GC for C++, for
example), I'd risk say that in general point 2 is wrong.
When people do benchmarks comparing the same code in explicit allocation
and GC, the GC uses more memory. However, and this is a big however, the
existence of GC means you can structure your algorithm to need far fewer
allocations. Kris Bell's talk on that at the last D conference was a
prime example of that.
For example, with GC you can slice an existing string. With manual mm,
you have to allocate memory and copy it.
