Swift, ARC and memory footprint vs JVM and GC

[vns]

@rysurd

About power consumption and ARC, would it be a stretch to say that because of how ARC is designed it is more efficient at power output than GC?

In general yes, power efficiency is one of the reasons, I suppose, that Swift has ARC, and not GC. From old (pre-forum) threads:

@Chris_Lattner

GC also has several huge disadvantages that are usually glossed over: while it is true that modern GC's can provide high performance, they can only do that when they are granted much more memory than the process is actually using. Generally, unless you give the GC 3-4x more memory than is needed, you’ll get thrashing and incredibly poor performance. Additionally, since the sweep pass touches almost all RAM in the process, they tend to be very power inefficient (leading to reduced battery life).

(emphasis mine)