I've been trying to think of a solution to use over here at
Remedy for making the garbage collector reference count
allocations instead of the current scan method (even with Rainer
Schütze's GC it still does a scan, and I'd feel much more
comfortable not having to schedule a GC collection somewhere in
our update loop).
I've totally missed the other threads on reference counting, but
should reference counting be a part of some library that you can
optionally use or should the garbage collector hide all that from
you?
My thinking on the subject is that you only need one additional
function added to the garbage collector that handles pointer
assignments. The parameters are a ref to the pointer you're
assigning to, and the new pointer. The GC would then decrement
the reference count for the memory referenced by the pointer
you're assigning to, and increment the reference count fr the new
memory referenced.
This, I imagine, would fit neatly in with slices and classes
equally. It would also be optional - the current default GC
wouldn't do anything with the function and . The downside is that
a pointer assign would invoke a GC call and that it would still
need to deal with circular dependencies in some fashion (however
dealing with that at an allocation level rather than a class
level seems potentially less problematic to me).
If this is beyond the scope of this thread, I'll start up a new
one to discuss all the potential pitfalls and problems that could
be encountered. I haven't had any time to actually do research in
to it or trial it yet.
