Re:Swift 3.0 Unsafe World
by ridiculous_fish on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @01:27PM
(#12591321)
Microsoft built their next-generation platform around RC instead of GC, despite their enormous investment in .NET, and years spent pushing it. That's clearly taking a step back.
It may be the embedded world has very advanced GCs that would perform well on modern mobile platforms, and just nobody has gotten around to integrating them yet. I don't know! But embedded devices with predictable workload that you can model and test are quite a different beast from a general-purpose computer, so that remains to be proven.
The problem in GC vs RC and decisions taken by companies, is that many times the decisions are political and not technical.
The outcome of Singularity and Midori is a proof of it, in spite of the outcomes prooven by their research, the projects were killed by management.
At least they allowed some of the tech to be repurposed for .NET Native.
Android GC has been quite behind the state of the art from what production embedded JVMs like Aonix and Websphere Real Time are capable of. Actually Dalvik was left in limbo for quite awhile before they eventually came up with ART.
So it is easy to just generalize GC vs RC without regarding what algorithms are actually being used, and the qut of said implementations.
There are military weapons control systems and factory robots using real time GC implementations of Java in hardware much more constrainted than a smartphone.