sutton036

The computer science research paper " Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management " by Emery Berger and Matthew Hertz contains an interesting study about memory management. However, the conclusions given in the paper were badly worded and are now being used to justify an anti-GC ideology. Introduction That paper describes an experiment that analyzed the performance of a benchmark suite using: Tracing garbage collection. Oracular memory management (precomputing the earliest point free could have been inserted). The experiment was performed: On one VM, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine (RVM). Using one programming language, Java, and consequently one programming paradigm, object oriented programming. Using each of the five different garbage collection algorithms provided by that VM. The five GC algorithms are: GenMS - Appel-style generational collector  (1988) GenCopy -  two generations with copying mature space CopyMS -  nursery...

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...