Nim's new cycle collector

[Araq]

On Thursday, 30 April 2020 at 13:49:54 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
> Objective-C and Swift are two well-known languages that use 
> reference counting. I remember some benchmark someone made in 
> his thesis where he wrote a drive for something in various 
> languages including Go and Objective-C.
>
> The version in Objective-C was too slow for the requirements of 
> a driver. It turned out that changing counters when adding and 
> removing items to collections were the main reason for this.
>
> On the contrary, the version in Go was fast enough. Apparently 
> because Go's GC runs short enough on every collection 
> invocation not to slow down the application too much.
>
> So to me the question arises whether reference counting in Nim 
> could be a problem for a language that is also intended to be 
> used for system programming. Eventually, a mix of reference 
> counting and manual memory management would do.


We don't do atomic reference counting so the results of Swift 
don't apply. If you can scroll up to the beginning of 
https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/5734 you can read more about it.