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Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?"

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On 7/28/2021 10:16 AM, Juha Nieminen wrote:
> Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> In article <sdpojb$aq7$2@dont-email.me>,
>>   Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Because it just works ?
>>
>> Because too many people still think garbage collection is
>> inefficient
> 
> Because it is.
> 
> Or, more precisely, perhaps GC *in itself* is not inefficient, but the
> paradigm it's solving has turned out to be.
> 
> You see, garbage collection arose primarily from a practical problem in
> object-oriented programming, and that problem is: When you dynamically
> allocate tons and tons of individual objects, and they refer to each
> other in a complicated mesh of references, how do you keep track of all
> of this so that each object is properly destroyed once nothing refers to
> it, and do it in a manner that's as easy for the programmer as possible,
> as efficient and possible, and allows for circular dependencies without
> causing leaks?
> 
> Thus, an incredible amount of academic and practical research work was
> put into garbage collection algorithms and implementations that were as
> efficient as possible.
> 
> Problem is, it's an efficient solution for a fundamentally inefficient
> programming paradigm. It's a solution to something you actually shouldn't
> be doing in the first place, in a modern computer system. What is this
> thing you shouldn't be doing, you might ask?
> 
> Dynamically allocating tons and tons of individual objects. That's what.
> 
> In the 1980's and largely the 1990's, when OOP was the absolute king,
> dynamically allocating tons of individual objects wasn't really such a
> huge problem. CPUs didn't care how you were accessing memory, or how
> the execution flow of the program jumped around. Each memory access was
> equally slow regardless of which memory address you were using, and
> every conditional jump was equally slow regardless of anything.
> 
> No longer.
> 
> CPUs started introducing memory caches, long instruction pipelines,
> predictive branching, and a bunch of other optimizations which
> suddenly started caring about how you access memory and how you do
> your conditional jumps.
> 
> It has turned out that one of the greatest programming paradigms that has
> ever existed, object-oriented programming, is also a performance killer
> in modern CPUs. This is because OOP, at least the traditional approach
> to it, is extremely cache-unfriendly, predictive-branching-unfriendly,
> and pipeline-unfriendly, and thus tends to produce inefficient
> executables.
> 
> For this reason for quite some time now many of the major projects out
> there that require extreme performance, such as game engines, have
> started moving away from an OOP design to a more data-oriented design
> which optimizes for modern CPU architectures much better than OOP does.
> 
> And the thing about data-oriented design is that it so happens that it
> doesn't benefit nor rely so much on a garbage collector, because you
> are trying to avoid random dynamic memory allocations in the first
> place (and prefer all data to be neatly in large arrays).
> 
> So yes, perhaps garbage collection *in itself* is not inefficient, but it's
> fundamentally tied to a programming paradigm that is, and moving away from
> that paradigm also lessens the need for GC.
> 

Good points, agreed.

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"Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-07-27 14:59 -0500
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-27 13:48 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> - 2021-07-27 22:05 +0100
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2021-07-27 14:23 -0700
        Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) - 2021-08-05 19:49 +0000
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> - 2021-08-19 20:08 +0000
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-08-19 18:20 -0700
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-20 06:13 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> - 2021-08-20 06:17 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-08-20 00:03 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-20 11:03 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" mickspud@downthefarm.com - 2021-08-20 15:19 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-08-20 14:26 +0200
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-29 23:40 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Cholo Lennon <chololennon@hotmail.com> - 2021-07-27 21:01 -0300
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-07-28 08:16 +0000
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 16:22 +0200
        Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-28 07:53 -0700
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 21:23 +0200
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Siri Cruise <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2021-07-28 14:16 -0700
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-07-29 06:53 +0000
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-07-29 09:31 -0700
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_71i5@slwgrcbmd1l7yi1.org - 2021-07-30 11:21 +0000
              Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-01 08:28 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-01 05:49 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-02 10:23 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_rLY23@_h_.co.uk - 2021-08-02 15:05 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-03 04:57 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> - 2021-08-03 12:16 +0000
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Öö Tiib <ootiib@hot.ee> - 2021-08-03 06:01 -0700
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2021-08-08 13:03 +1200
                Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Chris M. Thomasson" <chris.m.thomasson.1@gmail.com> - 2021-08-07 22:43 -0700
            Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> - 2021-08-01 21:40 +0100
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Chris Vine <chris@cvine--nospam--.freeserve.co.uk> - 2021-07-29 09:53 +0100
          Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Manfred <noname@add.invalid> - 2021-07-30 13:51 +0200
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Manfred <noname@add.invalid> - 2021-07-30 13:40 +0200
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Bonita Montero <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> - 2021-07-28 04:05 +0200
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" MrSpud_oyam9ltRb0@khlkg.info - 2021-07-28 09:30 +0000
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Bo Persson <bo@bo-persson.se> - 2021-07-28 08:19 +0200
  Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" "Chris M. Thomasson" <chris.m.thomasson.1@gmail.com> - 2021-08-03 13:10 -0700
    Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-08-03 18:37 -0500
      Re: "Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Cholo Lennon <chololennon@hotmail.com> - 2021-08-05 18:17 -0300
  Re:"Nearly a quarter-century later, why is C++ still so popular?" Blue Hat <blue_hat@hackershaven.com.jm> - 2021-08-08 13:33 -0500

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