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

"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+comp.compilers/news/@cs-www.cs.yale.edu>
17 Jul 2003 00:14:34 -0400

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[4 earlier articles]
Re: Compiler writers will love this language ericmuttta@email.com (2003-06-20)
Re: Compiler writers will love this language mwotton@cse.unsw.edu.au (2003-06-22)
Re: Compiler writers will love this language ericmuttta@email.com (2003-07-02)
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 nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (2003-07-13)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this langua dot@dotat.at (Tony Finch) (2003-07-15)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this langua monnier+comp.compilers/news/@cs-www.cs.yale.edu (Stefan Monnier) (2003-07-17)
Re: Storage management, was Compiler writers will love this langua monnier+comp.compilers/news/@cs-www.cs.yale.edu (Stefan Monnier) (2003-07-17)
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From: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+comp.compilers/news/@cs-www.cs.yale.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 17 Jul 2003 00:14:34 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 03-05-211 03-06-015 03-06-054 03-06-057 03-06-078 03-06-106 03-07-023 03-07-044 03-07-064
Keywords: storage, GC
Posted-Date: 17 Jul 2003 00:14:34 EDT

> That is deceptive, and many of the books on garbage collection
> approach propaganda on the issue. I agree with Lex Spoon here.


Probably because tracing GC has generally been criticized for its slowness,
so there's a lot of understandable defensiveness.


The fact that both ref-count and tracing GC are still in widespread use
after more than 40 years of competition is a strong indication that there's
no clear winner.


> |> Short of resorting to some kind of hybrid with a tracing algorithm,
> |> I don't believe anyone has ever fixed the cyclic graph problem with
> |> reference-counting.
> As it is theoretically impossible to fix, that seems likely :-)


I don't know what counts as a hybrid, but I think the paper below
is not using any kind of "tracing GC" technology:


      http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/papers/Bacon03Pure.pdf


Other possible approaches to dealing with cycles can be found in works
on distributed GC.




Stefan


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