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Postings from February 2001
On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 13:33:52 -0500 (EST), Sam Tregar <sam@tregar.com> wrote: >> 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. Yes, but incrementing the reference count is a single inc instruction too, and todays CPUs are optimized to do those fast too. I doubt a memory fetch, bit test and jump instruction is much fast than an memory increment. >> 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. I don't think so. Most Perl code nowadays makes heavy use of modules and man modules are written in OO fashion. But reference counting is *not* what makes Perl method calls so slow. -Jan