I found this quite interesting. The upshot is that they measure perf. of state-of-the-art GC vs RC and finds the latter to be about 30% slower. However, they also figure out where it's slower, and apply some simple optimizations bringing it to roughly on-par with GC, perf. wise. I'm thinking that Rust's language-based techniques for reducing reference increments (higly stack-based allocations, etc.), combined with the fact that reference counts are cheaper (since they're task local), could mean these techniques in the setting of Rust would make it beat GC. And if not, at least the performance measurements are informative.
R. Shahriyar, S. M. Blackburn, and D. Frampton, "Down for the Count? Getting Reference Counting Back in the Ring," in Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM ‘12, Beijing, China, June 15-16, 2012. http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rc-ismm-2012.pdf -- Sebastian Sylvan _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
