| From: | Jim Peters |
| Date: | 22 Sep 2000 at 22:46:54 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: XML and Java, a uncharted territory? |
On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 12:52:48PM -0500, Rudi Chiarito wrote:
> Well, it doesn't free all of the memory all the times, it causes more
> overhead whenever you dispose an object and it requires more memory.
> No wonder it's not seen as viable in many - most - cases.
If, as you suggest, Tao's JVM does a really good job of real-time
garbage collection, then I am more than willing to throw out
reference-counting. I'm cautious, still, until I've tried it for
myself, and got an understanding of the algorithm (if possible).
To me garbage collection is a compromise - it's never going to be as
efficient as C-code with all the alloc()s and free()s in the right
places. Reference counting gives something closer to this - the frees
get done right away, no scans of memory are needed, and so on
(assuming the programmer deals with circular-list issues).
Mark-and-sweep and friends make things very easy, but they cost you -
hopefully not too much - and hopefully the garbage collection won't
get in your way - but it might. It doesn't quite seem as much under
control as the other methods. It depends on how much uncertainty you
can tolerate in your application. If Tao have found a really good
solution that I really feel I can count on, I will be very happy
indeed. Good enough for low-latency sound generation, do you think ?
> > The link someone put up recently to the arstechnica site was
>
> What link is that?
Oops, sorry I was getting a bit mixed up. The link was actually to
the VoodooExtreme site (scan down the page a bit):
http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/tims5.html
The arstechnica link was about Dynamo, not Wouter:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynamo-1.html
> What guy was making references? Wouter who? The Wouter at Amiga? You've
> really lost me here. ;)))
The guy in the interview. And I guess this is the Wouter at Amiga -
the AmigaE guy. It seems that there had been some discussion about
garbage-collection issues.
> If you're talking about SHEEP, it offers faaaaaaaast memory management.
> And that's not the only faaaaaaaast thing about it...
I'll be very interested to see this when it is released.
Jim