Re: Comparison of numbers of 3rd party libraries

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

On Saturday, May 16, 2015, KHMan <keinhong@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/16/2015 3:41 PM, zejian ju wrote:
> > 2015-05-16 11:50 GMT+08:00 KHMan:
> >
> >     He wishes the app was running at a sustained 4
> >     instructions/clock/core... :-P
> >
> >     Or, he hopes someone else would do the hard work of making a
> >     cache-aware GC...
> >
> >     [intended as good-natured ribbing, let us be able to keep
> >     things slightly loose...:-p]
> >
> > Well..., I take back my words about "not-so-great Lua GC". Lua's
> > GC is great. I read all the GC code of Lua5.1/5.2/5.3. Its authors
> > put great effort to improve it and I like the elegant
> > implementation. what I mean is it can be made faster for my server
> > application.
>
> I'm not totally sold on the idea that an awesome GC is the best solution. The node.js ecosystem works because of V8's (is it still V8?) performance.
>
> Here, interpreted Lua is still interpreted, and if your dataset is big, assuming for example for an online multiuser app backend you will still touch plenty of data and churn the CPU cache. Now if you write a test script that has a workload not too different from your server load, then test GC-running and no-GC-running versions, then we'd have an idea what kind of difference we can get. I love data (de best thing to back up any claims), some timing data would be lovely here. But remember you can't get anywhere close to JIT performance with an interpreter...
>
> -- 
> Cheers,
> Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
> Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Is it possible that the issues that people experience with the GC might be more accurately framed as integration issues, rather than more generically? Integration might mean collecting userdata that points to large blocks, dealing with reference counted objects and errors, etc. I'm giving sub-optimal examples.l, but it does seemsl like GC issues are either nebulous, not really there, or are there, but out of Lua's hands. 

 Maybe the GC is fine as is, but could be improved with hinting or some other mechanism?

-Andrew