Linus with some good observations on garbage collection

[Alvaro]

El 22/04/2011 19:36, Walter Bright escribió:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-08/msg00552.html

I've always been surprised when discussions usually just bring garbage 
collection as the only alternative to explicit manual memory management. 
I imagined it as a garbage truck that has its own schedule and may let a 
lot of trash pile up before passing by. I always naively thought, why 
not just free immediately when an object gets no references?

Not an expert, so there may be reasons I don't see, but now that Linus 
says somethnig along the lines, I'll ask. Why not? Isn't it much easier 
to do refcount++ and refcount--, and if refcount==0 immediately 
"free()"? Memory will be available to other needs faster, no need for an 
additional thread, or a lot of memory consumed before the advanced 
garbage truck decides to come in, or slight pauses when collecting trash 
(maybe only in old implementations), and the implementation is much 
simpler...

OK, I knew about that "cyclic references" problem. But Linus doesn't 
seem to see a big problem and solutions can be found with care...