More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 12 May 2014 14:14:28 -0400, Ola Fosheim Grøstad  
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, 12 May 2014 at 17:52:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/12/2014 7:46 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> pointing at it is roughly 1/256. This problem is just about eliminated  
>>> with
>>> 64-bit pointers.
>
> Not generally true. This presumes that the heap is not in the lower  
> region of the address space and that you don't use 64 bit ints on the  
> stack.

I was thinking in terms of purely a random number happening to point at  
heap data. Practically speaking, I don't know the true likelihood based on  
the heap address scheme of 64-bit OSes, but I know that we always have a  
complainer who will try and do an array-append test on 32-bit code, and  
end up exhausting memory unexpectedly.

-Steve