Category:Phix: Difference between revisions

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Technically Phix does not have a garbage collector, instead it is reference counted, so memory is automatically reclaimed whenever a reference count drops to zero, and hence there are no sudden pauses, although the reference counting can itself reduce performance.
 
The fundamental goal of Phix is to make debugging easier, a whole subject area that does not seem to get the attention it deserves, despite several studies finding that most programmers actually spend between 70 and 90% of their time debugging. Most of us tend to think that getting just-written code to work is somehow not debugging, but that blokeclipboard-toting with a clipboardresearcher stood behind you would disagree.
 
Since 1.0.0 you can also run (many/most) Phix programs in a browser, by using pwa/p2js (as included in the distro) to transpile the program to JavaScript (plus a bit of standard HTML and CSS). If you see "'''with javascript_semantics'''" it means the program has been tested and works fine, both on the (Windows/Linux) desktop/Phix and in a browser via pwa/p2js, and in fact unix_dict() has been added to avoid reading unixdict.txt. Conversely, "without js" being present on a rosettacode entry means that (for instance) it uses the local file system, and is therefore desktop/Phix only. It is worth pointing out that "with js" and deep_copy() have proved ''staggeringly'' effective and nowhere near as painful as first feared. In just a few months (1.0.0 was released in July 2021) I have tested, fixed where necessary, and marked as javascript compatible ''[https://www.rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=phixonline over 1,100 rosettacode entries]'' for Phix, and only ''[https://www.rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=notonline one seventh]'' of that have as yet been marked incompatible, despite things like file i/o being prohibited within a web browser. The [https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Phix/online Phix/online] subcategory currently lists 78 entries deemed interesting enough to bother (manually) uploading to the Phix website (ping me should any stop working), and the next goal is to get pwa/p2js itself runnning online, but obviously without using file i/o directly.
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