There's a Garbage Collection ninja hiding in the project templates

An unwanted feature jumped out and attacked me!

In yesterday's post on implementing a CSV parser, I briefly mentioned that the parser took around 0.28 seconds to parse the test data that I provided. I consider this a good time for the parser to take but my first run was not so quick.

The first timing test I ran gave a parsing time of 1.15 seconds. This was slightly shocking to me, since I had already run a "control" test — where I just used componentsSeparatedByString: to break into lines and then into fields — that took just 0.95 seconds.

Had I really spent all that time writing code that was 20% slower (albeit more functional) than a clumsy, brute force approach?

No. As it turns out, the Xcode Project Template I had used for the test project, the:

Mac OS X→Application→Command Line Tool→Type:Core Data

project has Garbage Collection enabled by default.

The only real hint that this template is different is the objc_startCollectorThread() line in the default main() function — of course, I never saw this line because I always replace the source files in the templates with my own versions that follow my own formatting style.

Anyway, I turned Garbage Collection off and... boom 4 times faster.

I'd ask for more warning about these major — but subtle — changes to templates in the future but you know... ninjas, what can you do?