

Real World Comparison, GC vs. Manual Memory Management - paratrooper
http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20

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genbattle
I've had very similar concerns about GC vs. Manual memory management for
games. It's good to finally see some sort of quantitative research and
investigation, rather than people throwing around their opinions.

It's interesting that GDC is so much faster than DMD, especially given DMD is
supposed to be the reference implementation. But then he is using plenty of
optimization flags with GDC.

I don't know what sort of GC D uses, but incremental or generational garbage
collection would probably be better for smoothing out differences in framerate
due to GC rather than running an entire GC cycle every frame.

It's actually a pretty impressive game for only 3 months; I'm sure I couldn't
code a 3D game with particle effects and that sort of lighting from the ground
up in 3 months.

Overall for a performance hit of 4ms per frame, It would probably be worth
using a GC when you consider all the errors and issues it would eliminate from
game development. For me personally it would totally be worth it developing
small independent games. Maybe not so much for AAA games where performance
matters.

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rayiner
Interesting comparison, but it should be noted that DMD uses pretty much the
simplest possible GC (non-generational conservative mark-sweep).

