In message <op.u8nfpex8y5e...@laptopwanja>, Wanja Gayk wrote:
> Reference counting is about the worst technique for garbage collection.
It avoids the need for garbage collection. It means I can write things like
contents = open(filename, "r").read()
and know the file object will be immediately closed after its contents are
returned.
It also means I don’t have to predefine how much memory my program will use.
A garbage collector will only kick in when the app runs low on memory. On a
system with dynamic memory allocation, that will not happen until the entire
system runs low on memory, unless you limit the app to some fixed amount.
Which is an antiquated way of doing things.
And then there’s caching. Modern CPUs owe most of their speed to assumptions
that programs will obey locality of reference. Pointer-chasing is a cache-
hostile activity. Garbage collection involves a lot of pointer-chasing,
particularly of dead objects that have long since been flushed from the
cache, compared with reference counting of recently-accessed objects.
Therefore garbage collection loses performance.
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