sutton036

The way software developers cling to folklore and avoid proper experimental testing of hypotheses really bothers me. I think perhaps the worst branch of computer science still riddled with myths and legends is memory management. Despite over half a century of research on garbage collection showing that reference counting is inferior to tracing garbage collections algorithms (even when almost all GC research restricts consideration to Java when much better algorithms have been known for years) there are still many people who claim otherwise. C++ developers obviously still believe that reference counted smart pointers are superior to tracing garbage collection but now other people are doing it too. People who should know better. This situation recently reared its ugly head again when Apple released a promising new programming language called Swift that shuns tracing garbage collection in favor of reference counting. Now, there are logical reasons for Apple to have chosen reference count...

Nothing gets my hackles up more than people perpetuating memory management myths. Apparently there is a new trend in town thanks to Apple, who are deprecating their garbage collector on OS X in favor of Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). News website Cult of Mac say: “ iOS is twice as memory-efficient as Android. Here’s why. .. According to Glyn Williams over on Quora,  iOS devices run better than Android devices with twice the RAM  because Android apps use Java, and need all the extra RAM to do something called garbage collection.” Another news website, Redmond Pie, say: “That was basically the same question put to Quora, the social website that gives people a way to ask questions and then have them answered by people who are experts in their respective field. The upvoting system adds a spot of authority tracking to the answers that are provided, and we have a clear winner as far as the question around why Android phones have so much more memory than iPhones. Enter Glyn...

The recent news that Apple are selling around 18 million of their ARM-based iPads per year reminded us of our article Will Intel lose the computer market to ARM in 2012? from January. Following their success, there are now a growing number of competitors itching to release ARM-based tablet PCs of their own, like Marvell's $99 Moby tablet . Compare just those iPad sales to the 35 million netbooks of all brands sold in 2009 and the predicted 36 million netbooks to be sold in 2010 and it looks as though Intel may at least lose the mobile market to ARM in 2012.