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.
