On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> >I think I've heard you state that before. Can you be more specific? What
> >alternate system do you have in mind? Is this just wishful thinking?
>
> This isn't just wishful thinking, no.
You picked the easy one. Maybe you can get back to the other two when you
have more time?
> Code flow analysis can get an awful lot. Some help from the runtime will
> get the rest.
Do you mean that you can tell from a compile-time flow-control graph
exactly when DESTROY needs to be called for every object? What kind of
help from the runtime? Reference counting help?
> It's reasonably obvious (which is to say "cheap") which variables aren't
> involved with anything finalizable.
Probably a simple bit check and branch. Is that cheap? I guess it must
be.
> Nowhere near double the penalty. We only need to deal with refcounts when
> references are actually taken, assigned, or destroyed. That's a rare
> occurrence, relatively speaking.
Perhaps. It's not rare in OO Perl which is coincidentally one area in
serious need of a speedup. I suppose I'm warped by my own experience -
all the code I see every day is filled with references and objects.
That's probably not the average case Perl usage.
-sam
