I remember seeing a few benchmarks where v8 and go were competitive or sometimes even slightly more performant.
So not even sure that GC has always a perf cost is always true.
Not saying it doesn't in some cases, just so that we are clear but the truth seems to be more nuanced.
Ref-counting GC is pretty slow. It’s great for avoiding stop-the-world pauses, which can be really important for UI stuff like what Swift is used for, but you won’t win any throughput awards.
So well engineered for its use case. Was Go optimized for throughput?
Swift doesn't have a GC. The automatic reference counting is a feature that just inserts retain/release statements at compile time, so there is no additional process that handles that. I would suspect that the performance hits originate from other things.
Re:Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift
by cellularmitosis on Monday May 22, 2023 @07:54AM
(#36030191)
I don’t see a lot of utility in policing an overly narrow definition of what constitutes garbage collection.
You might be surprised (I was). Most of the benchmarks I’ve seen place it more in the neighborhood of golang and v8, rather than the C, C++, rust neighborhood you might expect.
Another commenter in this thread highlighted that the ref-counting GC is what keeps it out of the C / Rust performance neighborhood.