Why I Don't Want to Learn Go

Re:Why I Don't Want to Learn Go by edwardw on Monday March 19, 2012 @05:48PM (#3726440)

> but simple malloc/free are much faster and more predictable than what you see in GC'd languages

More predictable, very likely. Much faster, this is simply not true. E.g., quotes from an article by Brian Goetz[1]:

  The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is
  approximately 10 machine instructions, whereas the best performing
  malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100
  instructions per call. ... "Garbage collection will never be as efficient
  as direct memory management." And, in a way, those statements are right
  -- dynamic memory management is not as fast -- it's often considerably faster.

> allocation to the stack, something that effectively ceases to exist in GC'd languages.*

Not true, either. With escape analysis, Hotspot JVM can do stack allocation. The flag of doing escape analysis is actually turned on by default now.

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275/in...

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Re:Why I Don't Want to Learn Go by nknight on Monday March 19, 2012 @06:33PM (#3726653)

That writeup is certainly interesting, mostly with regard to escape analysis, but it's entirely untrustworthy with regard to the comparison to malloc. First, it appears to base its assumptions about malloc implementations on a paper dating to 1993 (WTF?!), second is that it thinks "instructions" is a meaningful metric for judging performance.

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