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by roel_v
3949 days ago
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People could (and did) design robust CORBA and (D)COM objects, but the overhead was too high in some (many?) cases. Overhead in development time, but also run time. If I can pass a const pointer to a bunch of data (if I know the consumer will live in the same memory space), then that's way faster (in development and run speed) than having to marshal that data into a common byte-order and alignment etc., most likely requiring copying, keeping track of who changed what when, ... Now that I have my old fogey hat on anyway, I might as well state the 'old wine in new bags' feeling I get with articles like this. Encapsulation and separation of concerns is good you say? But inconvenient because there is overhead? So infrastructure to manage dependencies and deployment of sets of loosely coupled components is useful? Whodathoughtthat! |
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Pass by reference became de rigeur for high performance systems when we agreed that the message passing overhead represented the plurality of computation time.
But pass by reference is shared state, and as we started trying to build systems with threading and for multiple cores the ugly truth about memory coherence on modern processors came out. It was pretty bad. Java and later C had to come up with some pretty odd looking compromises to get safety without throwing away all of the speed advantages.