Raoul Duke
Posts: 127
Nickname: raoulduke
Registered: Apr, 2006
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Re: Time is the New Memory
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Posted: Oct 2, 2009 3:25 PM
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> Compare with the proposed analogy, the advent of GC:
> pre-GC I had to be pretty smart all the time. Then GC
> came along and, to a reasonable approximation, I could be
> pretty stupid all the time. (Or apply my admittedly
> limited brain power to problems other than memory
> management.) I wrote the same code I always did, but just
> left off the memory management bits.
only if you were a really good, careful, programmer in the first place. like, if you are the kind of person who draws little maps on grid paper when playing adventure games.
i love gc. really. but it is such a small part of the overall story of memory, let alone resources in general, management! ask any maintenance programmer who has had to try to fix the bloody memory leaks in a java/c#/lisp/python/whatever-gcd-language-you-like system.
> Until I see a concurrency proposal that is that big of a
> win with very little cost, I'll remain skeptical of wide
> adoption. STM might be it, but it's going to have to be
> dead simple (from the users perspective) STM that melts
> into the background for most developers. And I remain
> skeptical that this is, finally, the moment that
> functional programming has been waiting for.
here's the problem: semantics.
at the moment, we do not have an AI that can say what parts of code need to be in the same transaction (this is the "external" race problem i said before). therefore, we cannot have a miraculous approach to concurrency where we omit more code (per how you describe the wins of GC).
sincerely.
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