Re: The orca, GNUstep's mascot

[Graham J Lee]

On 28 Apr 2008, at 17:42, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> On 28 Apr 2008, at 17:09, hns@computer.org wrote:
>
> > > See... this is gnustep, so while you could do that, it would best  
> > > be done as:
> > >
> > > RELEASE(willy);
> >
> > Well, I never understood completely why is it better (or best) to
> > replace some standard Obj-C method call syntax by standard C function
> > call syntax that breaks compilation on OSX without adding some
> > defines.
> >
> > I know that it allows to remove/undef all RELEASE() calls if we  
> > have a
> > working GC runtime.
>
> For what it's worth, I no longer think that's a good reason for  
> using RELEASE() ... processor speeds have improved so much over the  
> years that the performance overhead of calls to -release is really  
> not important.

Quick and unscientific testing with the debugger on the garbage- 
collected variant of the NeXT runtime shows that -[NSObject release]  
doesn't even get called in the GC environment, which makes "the  
performance overhead of calls to -release" entirely unimportant ;-)

Graham.