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JWZ, on Garbage Collection

jwz.org

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Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection

#31

Post by zandorg »

mahmud wrote: post #19
zandorg wrote: post #9

Double meaning is the guy who picks up the litter in his nightclub.

When you spent your precious youth creating XEmacs, mozilla, and netscape navigator, you're sure as hell allowed to have a pet nightclub; can you think of a better way to hack the popularity problem than to own a kickass music venue for hipsters? Don't hate the playa, hate the game! ;-)

I wasn't trying to get at JWZ, I was just making a silly unrelated joke, almost a pun. I don't have anything against him.

But I'll try and be more clear next time.

Re: JWZ, on Garbage Collection

#32

Post by benreesman »

lacker wrote: post #30
benreesman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience at all. The JVM garbage collector kicks ass today, right now in real applications all over the world, and the next one is going to be even better. There is very likely a class of application out there where extreme micro-optimization is still a good tradeoff (Google's search maybe?), but anyone arguing that they really need to write it in C and do their own memory management carries the…

Yeah, for Google most of the code that runs when you do a search is C++. (There's a lot of backend servers that handle different things so it isn't 100%, but the core search engine is definitely C++.) It's not just that it's extremely micro-optimized... the general issue is that when your code is running on enough machines it's more often a good tradeoff to spend programmer time to increase performance.

Exactly. Spending programmer time to gain some marginal improvement in CPU cycle efficiency is almost always a bad call, except when that code is going to run on a GAJILLION CPUs all of which use a lot of electricity etc.

I still think that this is only the case for a tiny fraction of all the code out there (Java is f*ing fast these days), and will become less and less true with each passing year.

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