Would you pay for GC?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Tuesday, 25 January 2022 at 09:42:25 UTC, Araq wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, that was kind of my point, unless one is willing to 
invest the required resources, a bit like you guys are doing with 
Nim, a RC implementation will not magically outperform modern 
tracing GC, only naive implementations of tracing GCs.