Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language

stephen@dino.dnsalias.com (Stephen J. Bevan)
17 Jul 2003 00:16:57 -0400

          From comp.compilers

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[9 earlier articles]
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language rodney.bates@wichita.edu (Rodney M. Bates) (2003-07-04)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language basile@starynkevitch.net (Basile STARYNKEVITCH) (2003-07-04)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language lex@cc.gatech.edu (Lex Spoon) (2003-07-04)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language mwotton@cse.unsw.edu.au (2003-07-04)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language blackmarlin@asean-mail.com (2003-07-04)
Re: Compiler writers will love this language joachim.durchholz@web.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2003-07-13)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language stephen@dino.dnsalias.com (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language monnier+comp.compilers/news/@cs-www.cs.yale.edu (Stefan Monnier) (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language haberg@matematik.su.se (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language lars@bearnip.com (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language RLake@oxfam.org.pe (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this language dmr@bell-labs.com (Dennis Ritchie) (2003-07-17)
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From: stephen@dino.dnsalias.com (Stephen J. Bevan)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 17 Jul 2003 00:16:57 -0400
Organization: just me at home
References: 03-05-211 03-06-015 03-06-054 03-06-057 03-06-078 03-06-106 03-07-023 03-07-037 03-07-066
Keywords: storage, GC
Posted-Date: 17 Jul 2003 00:16:57 EDT

Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz@web.de> writes:
> Mark Alexander Wotton wrote:
> > (Idle thought: seeing as the only way to create circular references is
> > through mutable references in a strict language, or tying the knot in
> > a lazy one, perhaps reference counting would be useful for a strict
> > purely functional language.)
>
> AFAIK, all such languages use mark-and-sweep collectors.
>
> I'm not sure about the exact reasons. I could imagine that it's just
> a case of "reference counting is beneath contempt", or a case of
> "mark-and-sweep was measured to be just as fast as reference
> counting", or simply "we want to avoid the analysis overhead of
> assigning ownership to objects when writing our run-time system".


The OCS implementation of Opal <http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~opal/>
uses reference counting. I remember reading an explanation of why
this was done sometime in the 90s, but right now all I can find is
<http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~opal/ocs/doc/html/hcguide.html> which
contains :-


    OCS uses an enhanced lazy reference counting approach to memory
    management which results in a residual garbage collector, that is,
    the garbage collector is compiled online into the code.



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