[Gllug] Linux workstation admin simpler than OS X

[Peter Corlett]

On 2 Aug 2009, at 10:43, Richard Jones wrote:
[...]
> As another example: they all use reference counting, which is very
> primitive form of garbage collection that has very high overhead.  But
> it is simple to implement, particularly if you have no background at
> all in computer science and you consider academic papers to be
> irrelevant to hacking away at code.

Mark-and-sweep and incremental garbage collection do indeed have  
excellent average-case performance for recovering unreferenced memory.  
But it's no magic bullet.

Reference-counting offers much more predictable object lifetime, which  
is useful when the object is more than memory, or you have a hard real- 
time system where stopping the world at a random time is inappropriate.

Not bothering to garbage-collect at all, and just freeing everything  
at program exit is even faster still, at the expense of high memory  
consumption.

There is no one true garbage-collector. It's all engineering trade-offs.


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