On Saturday, 25 May 2013 at 05:29:31 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
This is technically possible, but you said you make few
allocations. So with the tax on pointer write or the reference
counting, you'll pay a lot to collect very few garbages. I'm
not sure the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Incidentally, I ran across this paper that talks about a
reference counted garbage collector that claims to address this
issue. MIght be of interest to this group.
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bacon/Bacon03Pure.pdf
From the paper:
There are two primary problems with reference counting, namely:
(1) run-time overhead of incrementing and decrementing the
reference count each time a
pointer is copied, particularly on the stack; and
(2) inability to detect cycles and consequent necessity of
including a second garbage collection technique to deal with
cyclic garbage.
In this paper we present new algorithms that address these
problems and describe a
new multiprocessor garbage collector based on these techniques
that achieves maximum
measured pause times of 2.6 milliseconds over a set of eleven
benchmark programs that
perform significant amounts of memory allocation.
