On 17/10/2013 12:46 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
There's actually a hidden pause in reference counting as well. /Decrementing/ a counter can cause a cascade of deallocations. While that cost can be deferred, doing so hazards the main advantage of reference counting: rapid recovery of free space.
Indeed. The long-known duality between tracing and ref counting is obvious when you think of it this way: tracing is worst-case linear in the size of the heap on allocation, ref counting is worst-case linear in the size of the heap on destruction. It seems clear then that some hybrid is needed to eliminate the worst cases of both.
Sandro
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