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A comment on My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift. Parent comment

Re:My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift by fulafel on Sunday June 10, 2018 @11:33PM (#17281544)
> [...] no garbage collection, granted the reference counting in Swift can be problematic, but it seems to be improving with each release.

nitpick: reference counting is a form of GC in standard CS terminology. It saves some memory compared to other GC methods but is slowish.

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Re:My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift by chadcmulligan on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:19AM (#17282427)
reference counting is deterministic, GC isn't, which was always the apple engineers objection to GC - no pause while the collector runs.
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Re:My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift by beureum on Monday June 11, 2018 @04:37AM (#17282743)
There exist pauseless GCs, Apple's objection to GC is that GCs need more RAM, and that would reduce their profit margin on iPhones. A fair reason if you ask me.
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Re:My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift by fulafel on Monday June 11, 2018 @10:36AM (#17284553)
Reference counting has pauses, as object deallocations cascade. You can address this by having a deallocation work list that runs a bit at a time, but then again there is also a large body of work on other kinds of GCs that address pauses.
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