Hacker News Reader

Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>GC is a no-go, as it causes unacceptable frame-rate dips.

Does it, though? I've played titles written in Java and achieved smooth 60 fps back in 2008.

I play a lot of minecraft and GC related framerate issues are usually not a problem, but when they are a problem they can be quite annoying. You tune gc performance for your gameplay workload to a certain extent but obviously most players don't.

Those games will have been written in such a way as to avoid allocations like the plague, giving the GC very little to do. Sometimes your game can be written that way -- sometimes it can't.

Just like you have to avoid malloc() in C written games.

First, you don't have to avoid malloc() or similar allocators in games necessarily. You should avoid it in performance constrained situations. And you only should avoid calling malloc. It's not necessarily a problem to use these allocations in those situations. That's quite unlike Java, unless you're a GC wizard, and I'm not sure how far even those wizards can circumvent problems.

Second, to my knowledge it's still very cumbersome to avoid GC allocations in Java. By comparison, it's easy to reduce calls to global heap allocators in C.

First, also possible in GC enabled languages. That is what profilers are for.

Second, it is relatively easy to do native memory allocation in Java, but apparently people keep forgetting to learn their toolbox properly.

Third, calling malloc() is such an issue that there used to be companies specialised in selling optimised versions of malloc()/free().

Oh, come on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com