Would you pay for GC?

[Araq]

On Tuesday, 25 January 2022 at 07:22:36 UTC, Elronnd wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 January 2022 at 07:13:41 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> ARC will also not compete, unless one goes the extra mile of 
>> making the compiler ARC aware, elide retain/release calls, do 
>> cascade deletions in background threads, take care on cascade 
>> deletions to avoid stack overflows on destructor calls, 
>> provide multicore friendly versions of them,.....
>
> Indeed.  See Bacon et al, 'Unified Theory of Garbage 
> Collection': increasingly sophisticated RC approaches tracing 
> (and vice versa).  So it's a bit strange to assume we can do 
> one but not the other.  And tracing makes a better starting 
> point due to the generational hypothesis.

Only if you take the "deferred" RC route, which 
Swift/Rust/C++/Nim do not! Without the "deferred" aspect RC 
remains quite a different beast. Different algorithm, different 
runtime profiles, different memory consumptions, enables 
different optimizations and of course different problems.