The "no gc" crowd

[Manu]

On 9 October 2013 23:06, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca> wrote:

> On 2013-10-09 07:33:29 +0000, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> said:
>
>  Is there more to it? Cleaning up circular references I guess... what does
>> Apple do?
>>
>
> Apple implemented auto-nulling weak pointers for ARC (as well as
> __unsafe_unretained ones if you are not afraid of dangling pointers).
>
>  It's an uncommon edge case, so there's gotta be heaps of room for
>> efficient
>> solutions to that (afaik) one edge case. Are there others?
>>
>
> I don't know about you, but circular references are not rare at all in my
> code.
>
> Another solution that could be used for circular references is to have the
> stop-the-world GC we have now collect them. Reference counting could be
> used to free GC memory in advance (in the absence of circular references),
> so the GC would have less garbage to collect when it runs.
>
> Both solutions (week-autonulling and last-resort GC) are not mutually
> exclusive and can coexist.


I suspect there are plenty of creative possibilities that could be applied
to reducing the pool of potential circular-references to as small a pool as
possible.
It's simply not feasible to have machine scanning 4-6 gigabytes of
allocated memory looking for garbage.
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