On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Robert Mullen <robe...@autowc.com> wrote: > Too little resource, too little experience, too little return. The first two > are because this is a skunk works type corporate project that basically has > myself (an ex-.NET and general Windows coder) as it's resource so is > constrained by me. The third is because I don't see sufficient gain to doing > all the memory management myself. GC systems have become efficient enough in > our modern world that I think manual memory management has become pretty > specialized and out of place in 80% of desktop applications. Certainly there > is the other 20% of high performance and real time situations but mine is > basically a pretty face on a database. Anybody want to argue the other > direction? I am always willing to learn.
IMO you're right but also asking the wrong question. You shouldn't be asking whether GC is worthwhile for desktop apps, but whether *Cocoa's* GC is. They are not, unfortunately, the same question. While Cocoa's GC is quite good given the constraints it lives in, those constraints cause many unfortunate problems which don't exist in other collectors. Some are in the collector itself (don't take the address of a global pointer-to-object variable if you don't like to crash), and some are in the frameworks (NSData has hidden gotchas, NSInvocation doesn't keep strong references to message arguments, and many other weird problems). Apple did a good job with the GC given the constraints they were under (adding GC to a C runtime environment is Not Easy) but there are still quite a few shortcomings there. You may still be right that going with GC and fixing this stuff up is the best use of your time. I won't argue with that. I just wanted to point out that it's not as simple as saying "modern GCs are good enough for the job now" since the GC you have isn't exactly the GC you'd have in a more "managed" environment. Mike _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
