[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:

> On 2012-02-09, at 19:34 , Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >> They all agree multi-core is the future and whichever language can deal
> >> with them better is the future too.
> >>
> >
> > Surely not JavaScript (which is single-threaded and AFAIK also uses
> > refcounting :-).
>
> I don't think I've seen a serious refcounted JS implementation in the last
> decade. , although it is possible that JS runtimes have localized usage
> of references and reference-counted resources. AFAIK all modern JS
> runtimes are JITed which probably does not mesh well with refcounting.
>
> In any case, V8 (Chrome's runtime) uses a stop-the-world generational
> GC for sure[0], Mozilla's SpiderMonkey uses a GC as well[1] although
> I'm not sure which type (the reference to JS_MarkGCThing indicates it
> could be or at least use a mark-and-sweep amongst its strategies),
> Webkit/Safari's JavaScriptCore uses a GC as well[2] and MSIE's JScript
> used a mark-and-sweep GC back in 2003[3] (although the DOM itself was
> in COM, and reference-counted).
>

I stand corrected (but I am right about the single-threadedness :-).

> And note that a
> single-threaded event-driven process can serve 100,000 open sockets --
> while no JVM can create 100,000 threads.

 Only because it's OS threads of course, Erlang is not evented and has no
> problem spawning half a million (preempted) processes if there's RAM
> enough to store them.
>

Sure. But the people complaining about the GIL come from Java, not from
Erlang. (Erlang users typically envy Python because of its superior
standard library. :-)


>
> [0] http://code.google.com/apis/v8/design.html#garb_coll
> [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/SpiderMonkey/1.8.5#Garbage_collection
> [2] Since ~2009
> http://www.masonchang.com/blog/2009/3/26/nitros-garbage-collector.html
> [3] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/09/17/53038.aspx




-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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