On 4/18/14, 10:12 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 4/18/2014 8:34 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Well there's been work on that. I mentioned this recent paper in this
group:
http://goo.gl/tavC1M, which claims RC backed by a cycle collector can
reach
parity with tracing. Worth a close read.
A couple crucial points:
1. It achieves near parity with tracing, i.e. with a regular GC. It says
nothing about performance for regular pointer code, when those pointers
are replaced with ref counts.
This is moving the goalposts. "Regular pointer code" is unsafe, and
safety has been part of your past arguments. This is tracing GC compared
to refcounting, cut and dried.
2. It's a Java VM implementation. You can bet that the VM internally
isn't using ref counting - too slow.
Not sure what this means in context.
3. I picked a GC for D because a GC coexists peacefully with pointers of
all types. This is not remotely true with ref counting. It's not an
issue with Java, which has no pointers, but this coexistence problem
would be a huge one for D.
Agreed.
Andrei
