> What's the need of having reference counting? And more specifically, why do > we need message going into ruby to be reference counted?
Reference counting is a garbage collection strategy. It also happens to be one that is easily used in C++. The specific reason why we use reference counting in a few places is because it can some times be difficult to keep track of an object and know when to delete it. For example, if you fire off a message into the memory system, who is responsible for deleting it? There are many different paths that a message could take and potentially many different endpoints where a message could be finished. With reference counting, when the last reference is given up, the object is automatically destroyed. For more info, I suggest wikipedia or google. Nate _______________________________________________ m5-dev mailing list m5-dev@m5sim.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/m5-dev
