Re: Objective-C and Smalltalk; speed of message send

[Stefan Urbanek]

On 2004-08-19 18:23:33 +0200 Leigh Smith <leigh@leighsmith.com> wrote:

<snip>

> I'm surprised that automatic garbage collection would be found (or perhaps is 
> just assumed?) to be faster than reference counting.

Do you have any comparisons or pointers to some already done? It can be quite 
interesting.

<snip>

> More importantly, it's possible to read the code and understand what the hell 
> is going on! Good design is the key (and reference counting does not really 
> compromise that design, in my experience) and the dynamic OO of ObjC aids 
> that design process. Ditto Smalltalk, I certainly wouldn't mind GC, but for 
> real-time work I'd want some control over it, perhaps just hinting impending 
> reuse. Having looked at the audio code of Squeak (not recently), the higher 
> level design is great, but then the connection to the C means big design 
> compromises which miss the opportunity to propagate future design 
> optimisations.

Is it possible to use several GC techniques in a single application? Or use 
something like GC zones with different GC methods, where one can use 
ref.counting or suspend collection for time critical parts of threads.

Stefan Urbanek
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