[adrianm]

All GC algorithms are not created equal.

What algorithm are you referring to when you say "better throughput at the expense of significantly increased memory usage"?

Also, why is unpredictable latency acceptable for you on servers but not phones? Wouldn't a latency spike on remote requests from an application degrade user experience just as much as if that latency were localized to the phone?

[lumpypua]

> What algorithm are you referring to when you say "better throughput at the expense of significantly increased memory usage"?

Here's a discussion of the particular paper behind that statement: [1]

I'd also like to recommend the paper "A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection" [2] that breaks down the divide between GC and refcounting. There is a lot of gray area between tracing GC and refcounting. You can make different tradeoff decisions in different parts of your collection algorithm. But fundamentally it breaks down to time-space tradeoffs—you want to save time and get throughput, you're gonna eat some extra space.

> Also, why is unpredictable latency acceptable for you on servers but not phones? Wouldn't a latency spike on remote requests from an application degrade user experience just as much as if that latency were localized to the phone?

We as developers make UI efforts to mitigate network unreliability (fallacy #1 of distributed computing: the network is reliable) so it's ok if a server is being temporarily shitty. It's a lot harder to keep responsive, smooth UI behavior in the face of dropped frames and long GC pauses.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2982325/quantifying-the-p...

[2] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf