On Monday, 14 July 2014 at 23:43:57 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:22:53PM +0000, John Carter via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
Any other good blog posts / social media comments / pointers I
can
digest and use?
This one came to mind:
http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
From the link above:
"It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using
shared pointers in particular) is better than garbage collection.
There is actual research* showing that the two approaches are
just two sides of the same coin. You should realize that deleting
a shared pointer may lead to an arbitrary long pause in program
execution, with similar performance characteristics as a garbage
sweep. It’s not only because every serious reference counting
algorithm must be able to deal with cycles, but also because
every time a reference count goes to zero on a piece of data a
whole graph of pointers reachable from that object has to be
traversed. A data structure built with shared pointers might take
a long time to delete and, except for simple cases, you’ll never
know which shared pointer will go out of scope last and trigger
it."
* http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf
