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Postings from February 2001
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