OT: WWDC 2021, ARC in Swift: Basics and beyond

[Ola Fosheim Grostad]

On Sunday, 13 June 2021 at 00:50:44 UTC, Elronnd wrote:
> The advantage of reference counting is that it provides 
> reliable gc pauses.
>
> How much of a difference that makes—particularly insofar as you 
> can avoid allocations or disable collections during critical 
> paths—is not clear, but it's certainly not so simple a calculus 
> as you make it sound.

The point is that if you retain GC you still get the pausing of 
all threads.
You still get bad destruction and unreliable destruction.
And since you still dont have precise collection a big cycle will 
still leak. And it still is inappropriate for low mem devices.

So you basically retain many of the bad properties of the current 
GC. It just dont happens as frequently.

But by all means, I am not against people having the option, but 
it should not be the system level programming solution.