Am 14.02.2014 16:46, schrieb tcak:
A programmer's aim is to tell computer what to do. Purpose of GC is
to help him to prevent problems. In default, AFAIK, GC considers
every part of memory in case there are references in them. Well, if
the time taking process is scanning all memory, programmer could tell
to GC, if he/she trusts about correctness, not to scan some parts of
memory to limit scanning area. Example, if I create a char array of
10,000 items, why would I want GC to scan it. I won't put any object
references in it for sure.
This only works when you are the only guy on the team and have a small
codebase to visualize on your head.
The moment a middle size team comes into play, it is chaos.
There is a reason why manual memory managed languages have lost their
place on the enterprise.
--
Paulo
Many people wants to disable GC to improve performance (if there are
other reasons, it is not included here.). If after adding new codes,
memory problems start, just disable the GC-disabled-code-parts (as I
exampled with that 10,000 item array). This way, errors will disappear
and performance may decrease a little. Then fixing can be done to
increase performance again.
I think enabling GC for only some parts of code is wrong. It should be
disabling it for some parts of code. This way, if programmer loses
control of memory, he/she can remove GC-disabling codes, and tada
everything works correctly without doing any other changes.
Again, this example only works when you are the only guy working on the
code.
For example, projects of the size of Linux kernel are only viable in
languages like C, because there are guys validating every single line of
code that gets added to the kernel.
In most projects that is far from truth, everyone just checks whatever
they feel like. Then when the thing blows up on the customer and there
are high escalation meetings going over, there are a few poor souls,
usually senior developers, going over commit history and using tools
like Insure++ to track down the issue.
Sometimes it takes a whole week to track down such culprits.
I don't miss those days.
--
Paulo
