Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil...
by yxhuvud on Sunday December 18, 2016 @12:52PM
(#13206721)
> As the slides point out, to get the same performance with GC, you need 4x the memory.
I'd take that claim with a pretty big grain of salt. The paper they referenced used an experimental GC without use in production. Who knows how well or bad the default collector in the JVM would perform.
Also, it is not exactly recent. Hardware changes could have shifted the result in any direction.
Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil...
by Recurecur on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @11:05AM
(#13221031)
The exact numbers are worth a grain of salt. The general point aligns well with my JVM experience. Requiring at least double the working set for decent performing GC doesn't seem congruent with running the leanest possible data centers.
Regardless, determinism is the really big win. :-)
Where Swift excels is that it has the performance of C for the most part, and it will continue to improve. Another strength is ARC over Java style GC. As the slides point out, to get the same performance with GC, you need 4x the memory. With only 2x the memory, you get 70% lower performance with Java. Most important, though, is determinism. GC is simply not suitable for real time, hard or soft.
I'm very excited about Swift, and the current version of Xcode is working pretty well for me. I love the aggressive goal of replacing the C family of languages down the road...