Jeff M. wrote:
> This doesn't belong in "Lisp sucks" or "C++ sucks". Nor is this a rant
> on either language, so let's not start any flame wars. However, as a
> professional, console game developer (that happens to love Lisp), I
> thought I'd post my feelings on this subject...
>
> http://www.retrobyte.org/essays.php
>
> I'm sure people will agree, disagree and agree to disagree. That's
> fine. But I'd like any [constructive] feedback on the essay.
>
Then, contrary to the expressed wish in your essay, it's certainly going
to cause more posts, isn't it?
:-)
Your essay made me remember an interesting phenomenon I saw in one
system I worked on. There were two versions of it, one in Lisp and one
in C++. The display subsystem of the Lisp version was faster. There were
various reasons, but an important one was GC: the C++ code copied a lot
of buffers because they got passed around in fairly complex ways, so it
could be quite difficult to know when one could be deallocated. To avoid
that problem, the C++ programmers just copied. The Lisp was GCed, so the
Lisp programmers never had to worry about it; they just passed the
buffers around, which reduced both memory use and CPU cycles spent copying.