Paul Sanders (p.sand...@dsl.pipex.com) on 2009-03-14 6:29 AM said: >I'm sorry Bill, but the more I hear about GC and in particular the >difficulties of using it with malloc'd memory the gladder I am not to be >using it.
My unsolicited 2ยข: :) I am happy that the GC implementation keeps GC memory and malloc memory separate. It makes using C/C++ libraries in your GC Cocoa app much easier. Such libraries expect malloc to work the usual way, and would likely need all kinds of changes were malloc's behaviour changed. I work on a GC Cocoa app that uses several C and C++ libraries. It has not been difficult to integrate them. In fact, I spent more time retrofitting Obj-C libraries that were written to support retain-release only. I have found it much more pleasurable to work in GC, and would not go back! The biggest problems I have encountered are: 1) tools support. Finding classic leaks is basically impossible. : ( Recall that I use C and C++ libraries, and so have a need to do classic leak checking. MallocDebug.app crashes with GC apps, and 'leaks' and Instruments find nothing but false positives. 2) premature collection wrt inner pointers. Easily fixed by grepping for bytes|mutableBytes|fileSystemRepresentation|bitmapData and defensively sprinkling some [obj self] messages around. 3) NSPersistentDocument + GC + Core Data's SQL store don't work together. So I'm stuck with the XML store. :( 4) Universal Binary testing. Rosetta does not support GC. This means that your unit tests can't run in Rosetta, like they can and do with retain-release. Easily fixed by scrounging up a real PPC from somewhere. As for performance, I have encountered several instances where Shark reports various libauto calls in the top 5, but I have not investigated due to other priorities. Sean _______________________________________________ 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
