When will Java go mainstream like Python?

Paul Rubin no.email at nospam.invalid
Thu Feb 25 02:58:39 EST 2010


Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
> Pointer-chasing is a cache- hostile activity. Garbage collection
> involves a lot of pointer-chasing, particularly of dead objects that
> have long since been flushed from the cache, compared with reference
> counting of recently-accessed objects.  Therefore garbage collection
> loses performance.

Serious gc's these days only touch live data, not garbage; and they work
on small enough regions of memory most of the time (generational
scavenging) to not have too many cache misses.  Also, hyperthreading
seems to be coming back, allowing cpu cores to multitask in the presence
of cache misses.



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