8 ms·

I'm one of the biggest GC curmudgeons, but as long as it's an opt-in thing that you do not pay for when you do not use, I am happy. I speak as the kind of deve

I'm one of the biggest GC curmudgeons, but as long as it's an opt-in thing that you do not pay for when you do not use, I am happy. I speak as the kind of developer who wants to optimize the memory management.

tjoff 4y ago
As a developer, absolutely! But as someone who uses the internet for browsing, strong disagree.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  Most of what makes browsing slow is network latency. Each website is in essence a 'streamed' app.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    I've definitely seen janky webapps with the jank persisting even after all resources are fetched. Modern JS engines are very fast, but developers are faster (in pulling in quadratically more dependencies, negating all performance improvements instantly).
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      Are you sure everything has been fetched and processed? Some times this happens dynamically. Compare jank to an electron app where all artifacts are preloaded and preprocessed. To balance that, I've also seen jank in native mobile apps where developers haven't properly used the background thread, or done something strange in interface builder where the constraints don't solve properly. > in pulling in quadratically more dependencies, negating all performance improvements instantly Adding a lot of dependencies will affect memory consumption which may have knock-on effects due to paging if your system is low on memory, but that aside it's what and how much code is executed per frame that matters to speed. Dynamic memory allocation and garbage collect are probably the culprits you're searching for, but improvements of javascript engines and framework libraries have largely negated this issue for most websites.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    Not by a long shot. Slow network latency also isn't taking up gigabytes of ram either.
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      > Not by a long shot If I compare electron apps like Slack/Spotify/VS Code/etc, where all the assets are preloaded and processed, the app runs smooth. No FOUC or glitches as the page changes layout during loading. > Slow network latency also isn't taking up gigabytes of ram either Can't argue with that, given they are 2 different metrics.
      - tjoff 4y ago
        Oh god, electron apps have terrible performance. The apps do not run smooth by any metric. Even static pages over the internet is faster than spotify/slack locally.
        h0l0cube 4y ago
        Can’t say I’ve ever seen them jank. In my experience, compute doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor for Spotify etc., it only ever seems to be waiting for API calls to return. There really isn’t a whole lot of compute going on in a typical front end, and modern browser engines have JIT virtual machines and parallel processing with the final rendering pushed into the GPU. Even the processing power in a low end mobile is not struggling on compute for these applications
- xigoi 4y ago
  As someone who uses the internet for browsing, I don't want do download a separate garbage collector for every web app I use.

tjoff 4y ago

As a developer, absolutely! But as someone who uses the internet for browsing, strong disagree.

h0l0cube 4y ago
Most of what makes browsing slow is network latency. Each website is in essence a 'streamed' app.
- lxgr 4y ago
  I've definitely seen janky webapps with the jank persisting even after all resources are fetched. Modern JS engines are very fast, but developers are faster (in pulling in quadratically more dependencies, negating all performance improvements instantly).
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    Are you sure everything has been fetched and processed? Some times this happens dynamically. Compare jank to an electron app where all artifacts are preloaded and preprocessed. To balance that, I've also seen jank in native mobile apps where developers haven't properly used the background thread, or done something strange in interface builder where the constraints don't solve properly. > in pulling in quadratically more dependencies, negating all performance improvements instantly Adding a lot of dependencies will affect memory consumption which may have knock-on effects due to paging if your system is low on memory, but that aside it's what and how much code is executed per frame that matters to speed. Dynamic memory allocation and garbage collect are probably the culprits you're searching for, but improvements of javascript engines and framework libraries have largely negated this issue for most websites.
- tjoff 4y ago
  Not by a long shot. Slow network latency also isn't taking up gigabytes of ram either.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    > Not by a long shot If I compare electron apps like Slack/Spotify/VS Code/etc, where all the assets are preloaded and processed, the app runs smooth. No FOUC or glitches as the page changes layout during loading. > Slow network latency also isn't taking up gigabytes of ram either Can't argue with that, given they are 2 different metrics.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Oh god, electron apps have terrible performance. The apps do not run smooth by any metric. Even static pages over the internet is faster than spotify/slack locally.
      - h0l0cube 4y ago
        Can’t say I’ve ever seen them jank. In my experience, compute doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor for Spotify etc., it only ever seems to be waiting for API calls to return. There really isn’t a whole lot of compute going on in a typical front end, and modern browser engines have JIT virtual machines and parallel processing with the final rendering pushed into the GPU. Even the processing power in a low end mobile is not struggling on compute for these applications
xigoi 4y ago
As someone who uses the internet for browsing, I don't want do download a separate garbage collector for every web app I use.