On Sep 18, 2006, at 9:56 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
* I doubt the anecdotal comments about Boehm GC with respect to performance. It may be better or it may be worse. While I think thelatter is more likely, only an implementation patch will tell the tale.
hear, hear ;-). Other anecdotical evidence says that a GC can be significantly faster than manual allocation, especially a copying collector where allocation can be really, really cheap. Boehm's GC isn't a copying collector, but I wouldn't count it out just because "everybody knows that GC is slow".
I'd be more worried about changes in semantics, it's pretty convenient to write 'open(somefile, 'r').read()' to read a file in bulk, currently this will immediately close the file but with a GC system it may be a long time before the file is actually closed.
Another reason to be scared of GC is some bad experience I've had with Java's GC, its rather annoying if you're a sysadmin, get a Java app thrown over the wall and then have to tweak obscure GC-related parameters to get decent performance (or rather, an application that doesn't crash after running for a couple of days). That may have been bad code in the application, but I'm not entirely convinced that Java's GC doesn't deserve to get some of the blame.
Ronald
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