Re: Compiler writers will love this language

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".


Regards,
Jo

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