Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Jon Harrop
Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 01:20 am

Scott Moore wrote:
> In addition, there are garbage collectors, and there are garbage
> collectors. The stupid ones wait until they run out of continigous space
> before running a collection cycle, garanteeing that the system will go
> offline for a significant period of time...

Yes, people often worry about GCs interrupting soft real time applications
such as graphics and visualisation. We're using OCaml a lot for
visualisation and it works very well. Around 30% of the running time is
spent in the GC because the code is data structure intensive but the GC
never causes noticeable slowdowns.

Indeed, the OCaml version of our renderer is actually smoother than the old
C++ version because we have been able to implement much more sophisticated
algorithms in OCaml than were feasible in C++.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com

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