[fpc-devel] Modernising Pascal

[Jamie McCracken]

Marco van de Voort wrote:
>>On 25 feb 2005, at 15:49, Marco van de Voort wrote:
>>
>>
>>>- Critical parts are often handoptimized by using a lot of non GCed 
>>>types
>>>	(like int), this is not a typical programming method for these
>>>	languages, but outright expert tuning.
>>
>>Critical paths are also optimized in our compiler to not use 
>>ansistrings, because reference counting is also slow.
> 
> 
> And I was talking more specific about the Quake II benchmark that was
> brought. Any tweaks would already be on top of the existing ones in the
> code.
> 
> 
>>The argument is not about whether or not we should make Pascal entirely
>>GC'd, but about whether reference counting is better/worse than other
>>garbage collection techniques if you have a significant amount of GC'd
>>objects.
> 
> 
> The Quake II benchmark was used to "prove" that full blown (I assume Boehm)
> GC was not slow. Q II, as tuned app, is probably already using primitive
> types heavily, thus not a poster child for this benchamark

And the same also applies to functional languages like ocaml and LISP 
which use primitive types a lot. I am sceptical because every app that I 
have seen that makes heavy use of *objects* is slow when GC'ed (cf 
Eclipse compiled with gcj - IE even with no bytecode it is sluggish).

However rather than having endless arguements about this is faster or 
slower than that what we really need is a benchmark for FPC with some 
GC'ing if some of the FPC developers are willing to investigate this 
(which is probably unlikely given they have enough on their plate with 
FPC 2.0).

jamie.

> 
> 
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