Re: Why Mobile Apps Are Slow

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Michal Kolodziejczyk <miko@wp.pl> wrote:
> On 15.07.2013 20:24, Michal Kolodziejczyk wrote:
>> Pozdrawiam,
>>     Michał
>
> Sorry for that empty message, that was send by pressing accidentaly a
> key on my android phone.
> Back to the topic, I wondered if the planned garbage collector for
> luajit 3.0 would help with memory management:
>
> http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector
>
> OTOH, I wondered if a subset of lua with typed variables and no GC would
> be possible (asm.lua, like asm.js from asmjs.org), and if that would
> made any difference.
>
> Regards,
> miko
>
>

My take is that he's completely ignorant about Lua and that the
article is much more about "mobile apps in web browsers" not native
applications.

So, in making his case, he lumps all languages together and puts Lua
in the same box. One of his points is that, because Javascript does
not allow you to control the GC, it precludes you from a critical
opportunity to overcome one of GC's limitations, which is suspending
it during critical points in the code.

My guess is that, if he deemed it relevant, he could do a simple test
and judge Lua against his points. I my experience and observation is
that A) He makes great points, B) Lua backs his points up and C) Lua
does the things that it needs to do in order to be a relatively
performant garbage collected dynamic language.

No fancy-new-GC required, as far as I can see.

-Andrew