> I don't think speed is where the interest is coming from. GC should fix
> common memory problems, such as the nasty circular references issue that
has
> caught all of us at some time.
Normally, GC is more efficient than ref count, since you will have many
advanced gc algorith to choose and don't have to pay malloc overhead.
On MP machine, ref count is really slow, because of the atomic instructions,
which are very slow. I measured the atomic x86 instruction such as
"LOCK INC DWORD PTR [ECX];" long time ago. I believe each instruction takes
about 10 to 30 clock cycles.
The main issue with GC is the pause. The advanced gc can reduce typical
pause to
< 10ms most of time. The full gc
Hong
