waffle

“firestorm”, commenting on a piece on Objective-C GC by Scott Stevenson:

Garbage collection in Mac OS X 10.5 can be faster than retain/release on multi-core systems. retain/release requires the code to obtain a lock, which is expensive. On multicore systems, libauto (the GC) can examine the heap before it pauses the thread so it knows what it’s doing going in. And, if there are UI events in the queue, it’ll abort it’s job and wait for the next idle time. It’s probably the most advanced GC on the market.

If it was October 26th today, I could tell you how libauto is also interesting on account on being driven by requests from someplace lower (like Foundation) and how that means that it only collects when you or Cocoa ask it to, and how it only collects stuff on the main thread. But it’s not, so I won’t.