Taste [LWN.net]

Taste

Posted Sep 6, 2007 16:00 UTC (Thu) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122)
In reply to: Taste by lysse
Parent article: LinuxConf.eu: Documentation and user-space API design

> Allocating objects on the stack and passing parameters by reference are,
> contrary to your apparent belief, neither innovations in C++, nor rendered
> impossible in a garbage collected language; again I cite Oberon, which is
> just fine with both and yet fully GC'd.

I never say they are never "rendered impossible" (Even C++ does that!), and the "apparent belief" seems very speculative (e.g., Even assembly does stack based allocation!). Let me remind the beginning of my original post.

> "I think one problem of *many* GC systems is that..."
(emphasis added here)

What I mean is that many "short-comings" that others talk about GC are not intrinsic to the availability of GC, but instead they are due to particular languages which have made certain choices, like which of the allocations they choose to tax the GC system. Again, most people should not care at all.

> Appel (1987) shows that garbage collection can still end up faster than
> stack-based allocation.

I'm interested in this work. Is it available on-line, or if not, can you give the name of the journal/conference where it appear in?

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Taste

Posted Sep 6, 2007 16:16 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]

> What I mean is that many "short-comings" that others talk about GC are not intrinsic to the availability of GC, but instead they are due to particular languages which have made certain choices, like which of the allocations they choose to tax the GC system. Again, most people should not care at all.

In that case, then I thoroughly misunderstood you - I thought you were making exactly this mistake yourself. Sorry.

> I'm interested in this work. Is it available on-line, or if not, can you give the name of the journal/conference where it appear in?

It's available online: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/appel87garbage.html

Taste

Posted Sep 6, 2007 17:03 UTC (Thu) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

> It's available online: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/appel87garbage.html

Thanks. Just read it briefly. I would not agree that GC is faster than stack allocation because of that, though. I echo Stroustrup's joke that if you have that much memory you are supposed to use them to prevent any process from getting into the swap. =)

Taste

Posted Sep 7, 2007 23:48 UTC (Fri) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]

Fair enough, but his opinion was peer-reviewed. :)

Taste

Posted Sep 8, 2007 6:41 UTC (Sat) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

> Fair enough, but his opinion was peer-reviewed. :)

Peer review process seldom block correct but practically irrelevant work. :)