Re: Some thoughts about GS

[Christian Edward Gruber]

I'm not a big fan of Garbage-Collection.  This is not from a theoretical
perspective but more from a "in the trenches" perspective.

The minute I moved from architecting Objective-C n-tier stuff to Java, I was
dealing with a whole other mind-set.  Particularly the largest falacy about
garbage-collection that you can be "freed" from distraction around memory
management.

This is a falacy because in this mind-set, people forget to dereference
things, people alocate much more memory and don't clean up because it will
be "GC'ed", and generally habits go to waste.  This is not a problem with GC
per se, but rather with people.  Most of the problems I've had with memory
management haven't been pointer math (as the earliest Java people
protested), but with simple leaks.  These leaks occur in Java code as well,
and are no harder or easier to find.  You run a profiler, and you're done.

Objective-C pose-as actually made this tracking easier in Objective-C, as
you could have an object Pose-as NSObject, and write report memory usage
when debugging.  You can still find this out in Java, but it's slooooower.
;)

Anyway, I'm not anti-java, but I think Objective-C has many features which
are worth the costs, and most of the supposed advantages that Java has,
Objective-C also has.  And frankly, for n-tier server apps, (which is more
what I care about), write once compile anywhere is as good as write once,
run anywhere, as far as I'm concerned.  Probably not for e-mail clients, but
hey...

> Only if you like the QT classes.  I guess my point is that the things I
> love about *step are the UI, tools and the way the libraries hang
together,
> rather than the underlying language - and I guess there I diverge from
> Ian Mondragon's PoV. Java is by no means perfect, but is usable, and with
> GNUstep APIs would be far more pleasant to use than with Sun's I/O
libraries
> and AWT.  Anyway, I 'want' GNUstep much more that I 'want' Java so I'll
> happily code in Obj-C (spare time permitting!)

Actually, we (at Lighthouse) had pretty close to AppKit in Java, and NeXT
did basically have AppKit and Foundation Kit in Java.  It was niiiiiiiice...
for java.

regards,
Christian.

P.S.  Oh, and Java may have better reflection _classes_, but lookups are
5-10x slower for dynamic invocation, owing to static v-table messaging vs.
selector hash lookups. Better object hierarchy, but infrastructure is icky.