s...@pobox.com writes: > http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=lock+free+reference+counting
I found a paper by Detlefs et al describing a method which is a) patented b) can potentially lock out some threads from ever running, and c) relies on a hardware instruction (double compare and swap) that's not available on most processors. There are well known concurrent and parallel GC techniques that don't have that problem, see for example Cheng's dissertation: http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2001/CMU-CS-01-174.pdf GHC 6.10 uses a parallel stop-the-world gc that is simpler, I think. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
