[kwlug-disc] about silicon

Mikalai Birukou mb at 3nsoft.com
Sat Dec 12 18:31:40 EST 2020


<moving into discussing silicon and near it>

> Another trick is that Apple's dev languages and frameworks (Swift and 
> Objective-C) use reference counting, which requires atomic increments 
> and decrements. On Intel, these operations are five times slower than 
> non-atomic operations; on Apple Silicon they run at the same speed. 
> This is something I wish the other CPU vendors would get right, 
> because refcounting has some technical advantages over tracing GC, and 
> I use it in software I write. C++ and Rust, both "performance" 
> languages, provide refcounting but not tracing GC.
>> Regarding M1. My Understanding is that placement of RAM inside of 
>> processor package/silicon is the trick that makes it run fast. Is 
>> there anything else?
>>>  The Apple M1 looks decent, but since Apple no longer lets you run 
>>> Linux on their hardware, I have no desire to ever buy one.
Does Rust standard refcounting, or implementation of such pointers need 
to use atomic in/decrements? Can't it use non-atomic something, given a 
more detailed knowledge of ownership? Just wondering.
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