Re: [Chicken-users] IPhone

[felix winkelmann]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Nicholas "Indy" Ray <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:54 AM, felix winkelmann <address@hidden> wrote:
>> This is so crazy. As if GC'd memory management would be less safe
>> the manual memory management. The absurdity is breathtaking.
>
> I doubt the choice is for safety, in general manually managed
> applications in general make less allocations, and don't have to spend
> cycles for GC. In a language that doesn't support memory compaction,
> such as Obj-C, on a single address space machine I could imagine how
> fragmentation could cause a lot of problems. Additionally, both more
> allocations and more Collections use more cycles and thus more energy.
> Apple does a lot to try to maximize the amount of battery life. Which
> is why they have made such decisions as no background processes.
>

I can understand that conservative GC is seen as a problem (it is
by definition not reliable), but there are many GC strategies and
a good, precise automatic memory manager that is safe for space
complexity will actually use less storage (even if performing more
allocations) than manual memory management, unless the latter
is insanely tuned.


cheers,
felix