[fpc-devel] Suggestion: reference counted objects

[Boian Mitov]

   Hi Giuliano,

Funny that you mentioned it. Industrial automation, and process control are one of our specialties ;-) . Actually this is my major.
However I am somewhat unusual in that I have implemented in my career almost every class of application you can name, with a large number of different technologies. Yes, I have implemented process control applications 20 years ago without ref.counting and I implement them today with it, and I can assure the later makes it easier and actually faster at the end (less overhead).
Even our current line or products covers large variety of areas – we have video, audio, DSP processing components, computer vision, Artificial Intelligence, Boolean logic/hardware simulations, and much more, and we are in about to release process control library – OPC, PID, Relay controllers etc.
Aside from that I used to have my own HW company ~30 years ago, and have done a lot of HW designs many surprisingly still in use. I think I have (for good or bad) a unique overview over the full spectrum of technologies, and intimate experience with most of them.

In reality I am very dissatisfied with them all... but that is a different story, and I am working to hopefully address that in the future ;-) .

With best regards,
Boian Mitov

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Mitov Software
www.mitov.com
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From: Giuliano Colla 
Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2014 3:19 PM
To: FPC developers' list 
Subject: Re: [fpc-devel] Suggestion: reference counted objects

I might, for example, tell you that my company has been successfully implementing since more than 30 years a class of applications for the control of industrial processes, with hundreds of threads running simultaneously in a multi-CPU environment, with thread synchronization in the sub-millisecond range (with time it has improved down to the sub-microsecond area, with the evolution both of hardware and software tools), where reference counting simply doesn't apply, because of the specific nature of the problems. All the required resources must be created at startup, and they can only be destroyed when the process is stopped, at the end of the day in some cases, at the end of the week or for the annual vacations in others.

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