On Monday, 31 December 2012 at 12:14:22 UTC, Sven Over wrote:
On Tuesday, 25 December 2012 at 19:23:59 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
There's also often no reason not to have the GC on and use it
for certain stuff
One thing that really freaks me out is the fact that the
garbage collector pauses the whole process, i.e. all threads.
In my job I'm writing backend services that power a big web
site. Perfomance is key, as the response time of the data
service in most cases directly adds to the page load time. The
bare possibility that the whole service pauses for, say, 100ms
is making me feel very uncomfortable.
I understand that. However, refcounted stuff tends to die in
cluster as well and create pauses.
The main issue here is clearly GC's implementation rather than
the concept of GC in itself (which can be quite good at avoiding
pauses if you are ready to make some other tradeoffs).
We easily achieve the performance and reliability we need in
C++, but I would love to give D a chance, as it solves many
inconveniences of C++ in an elegant way. Metaprogramming and
the threading model, just to name two.
Here is something I tried in the past with some success : use
RefCounted and GC.free . Doing so, you allocate in the GC heap,
but you will limit greatly the amount of garbage that the GC have
to collect by itself.
Note that in some cases, GC means greater performances (usually
when associated with immutability), so disabling it entirely
don't seems a good idea to me.
