On Saturday, 10 February 2018 at 19:22:51 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Saturday, February 10, 2018 14:06:09 Timon Gehr via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 08.02.2018 16:55, JN wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 14:54:19 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
> wrote:
>> Garbage collection has proved to be a smashing success in
>> the industry, providing productivity and memory-safety to
>> programmers of all skill levels.
>
> Citation needed on how garbage collection has been a
> smashing success based on its merits rather than the merits
> of the languages that use garbage collection. Python was
> also a smashing success, but it doesn't use a garbage
> collector in it's default implementation (CPython). Unless
> you mean garbage collection as in "not manual memory
> management"? ...
Even if "garbage collection" is taken to mean "collecting
garbage", reference counting is garbage collection. Referring
to RC as not GC makes no sense at all and was probably only
invented because some people want to think that RC is good but
GC is bad, being too lazy to say "tracing GC".
Except that RC and what folks typically mean what they talk
about GC are fundamentally different. Yes, they both
automatically free memory for you, but one is deterministic,
whereas the other involves periodically running a collection to
find memory that can be freed. So, yes, in a sense, RC is a
form of GC, but they're very different beasts.
- Jonathan M Davis
People like to think that RC is deterministic.
First of all, unless they are atomic, there are no guarantees of
pause time during locking on counter access.
Second, Herb Sutter has a great CppCon talk about
non-deterministic releases, with the possibility of stack
overflow, in complex datastructures.
Herb Sutter “Leak-Freedom in C++... By Default.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfmTagWcqoE
