At 01:10 PM 4/28/2005, Dan Sugalski wrote:
At 5:57 PM +0200 4/28/05, Robin Redeker wrote:
On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 03:43:32PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
At 5:40 PM +0200 4/27/05, Robin Redeker wrote:
The expense is non-trivial as well. Yeah, it's all little tiny bits
of time, but that adds up. It's all overhead, and useless overhead
for the most part.
Yes, but do we know whether refcounting is really slower than a garbage
collector in the end?
Yes, we do. This is a well-researched topic and one that's been gone over
pretty thouroughly for the past twenty years or so. There's a lot of
literature on this -- it's worth a run through citeseer for some of the
papers or, if you've a copy handy in a local library, the book "Garbage
Collection" by Jones and Lins, which is a good summary of most of the
techniques, their costs, drawbacks, and implementation details.
Research indicates that in theory, garbage collection can even be faster
than explicit memory management. One paper I remember in particular was
done by IBM using various GCs for the JVM.
-Melvin
