[racket-dev] gc vs assignment

Yes, I was taught the same thing in 1984. That's not the issue. 



On Aug 24, 2010, at 10:17 AM, Robby Findler wrote:

> My experience is that allocation is the primary thing to look for to
> improve performance.
> 
> Robby
> 
> On Tuesday, August 24, 2010, Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Catching up with some mail.
>> 
>> Neil wrote:
>> 
>>> Avoiding allocation reduces GC collects, which reduces stutters and hitches.
>> 
>> My (possibly old) understanding of GC and mutation tell me that this is one of those prejudices that programmers should get rid of. Every mutation goes across an access barrier in a GC like ours and can thus be much more expensive than a lightweight allocation. This was certainly true for early generational collectors. I do know that the hordes of Java programmers who invaded GCLand forced GC builders to make C/C++-like programs in Java work reasonably fast with collectors and so collectors changed.
>> 
>> Matthew, do you know what it's really like for us?
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