[Python-Dev] Linus on garbage collection (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri May 6 19:15:33 CEST 2011

Mark Shannon writes:

Neal Becker wrote:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-08/msg00552.html

Being famous does not necessarily make you right.

No, but being a genius sure helps you beat the odds.

OS kernels are pretty atypical software, even if Linus is right about Linux, it doesn't apply to Python.

Well, actually he was writing about GCC....

I have empirical evidence, not opinion, that PyPy and my own HotPy are a lot faster (x5 or better) on Unladen Swallow's gcbench benchmark (which stresses the memory management subsystem).

You're missing Linus's point, I think. Linus did not claim that it's impossible to write a fast GC. He claimed that it's hard to write a fast program that uses GC for memory management. A benchmark that stresses only the memory management system is unlikely to impress him.

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