Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: billf@medicus.com (Bill Foote)
Subject: Re: Warne's Garbage Collector (WGC)
Message-ID: <1995Jul20.000309.8619@medicus.com>
Organization: Medicus Systems Corp.
References: <3uhetv$hc0@stud.Direct.CA> <3ujndg$nf9@news1.delphi.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 00:03:09 GMT
Lines: 40

In article <3ujndg$nf9@news1.delphi.com> jsutherland@BIX.com (Jeff Sutherland) writes:
>>Blindingly fast means <...>
>>
>>FastNew benchmark results:
>>Memory Manger / Compiler      Visual C++  Watcom C++  Borland C++ Symantec
>>C++
>>WGC (automatic-simple) new      0.0394      0.0647      0.0964      0.2502
>>WGC (automatic-simple) collect  0.0080      0.0062      0.0075      0.0075
>
>Kevin,
>Your comments seem to me to imply that a C++ application developed with
>this garbage collector would typically run faster than an application where
>the programmer is allocating and deallocating memory space.  What are your
>thoughts about this.

I have nothing against Kevin (from what I've read, it sounds like he's
created a fine product), but:

It's not very hard to make a memory management system that does 
significantly better than Borland's.  Borland's implementation of malloc()
is really horrible.  (I saw one app that swapped heavily going from a
a run time of over a weekend to ten minutes when I switched from Borland's
malloc() to SmartHeap).  I don't know about Watcom or Symantic, but from
the figures I've seen for M$ VC++, its malloc() isn't much better.

If the implicit question is "does GC perform better than manual memory
management", a more meaningful starting point would be a comparison between
a decent malloc(), like SmartHeap's, and a good GC implementation.

To put it another way:  Just because my '84 Toyota can beat a '75 Ford Pinto
that's running on three cylinders doesn't mean that Japanese cars are
faster than American cars :-)

--
Bill Foote                | Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus ecrit.
billf@medicus.com         | [Add little to little and there will be a big pile]
Medicus Systems           |    -- Ovid, via Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Alameda, CA USA           |


