On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Sam Tregar wrote:
> Well, there's the Perl 5 reference counting solution. In normal cases
> DESTROY is called as soon as it can be. Of course we're all anxious to
> get into the leaky GC boat with Java and C# because we've heard it's
> faster. I wonder how fast it is when it's halfway under water and out of
> file descriptors.
GC has nothing to do with finalization. Many people want it to, and seem
to conflate the two, but they're separate. Dead object detection and
cleanup doesn't have to be tied to memory GC. It won't be in perl 6. The
perl 6 engine will guarantee whatever cleanup/finalization order and
timliness that Larry puts into the language definition. That's not a
problem.
FWIW, going from a manual memory management scheme to a GC scheme is
generally a good-sized performance win. Talk to the GCC people if you
don't believe that.
Dan
