Greg Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Edward C. Jones wrote: > > > Maybe some day a sufficiently portable automatic garbage collector will > > be available for C. Until then, we'll have to live with reference counts. > > Even if it did become available, we might not want to > use it. In recent times I've come round to the view that, > on modern architectures where cacheing is all-important, > refcounting + cyclic garbage collection may well be > *better* than mark-and-sweep or some variation thereof.
The refcounting vs generational GC reasoning I've heard argues that refcounting is less cache-friendly: The cache line containing the refcount field of the pointed-to objects is dirtied (or at least loaded) every time something is done with the reference, even when the object itself is not accessed in any way. Generational GC is said to make the most frequent gc-related memory references somewhat localised. -- erno _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
