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A comment on For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection. Parent comment

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by rickbutton on Thursday May 09, 2019 @08:03AM (#19867426)
Your definition of garbage collector excludes reference counting, which does not require scanning memory. Reference counting is a form of garbage collection. The type of garbage collection you are referring to is the sub-type of "tracing" garbage collection.

However, I agree, "free()" is not garbage collection, but rather a form of memory management, of which garbage collection is a subset, and manual (free) is another.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by zZorgz on Thursday May 09, 2019 @10:03AM (#19868367)
It depends who you ask. In my point of view, "reference counting" is a strategy that has nothing inherently to do with memory management and can even be manual instead of automatic. GC as the name implies should involve a collector of sorts.
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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by klyrs on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:53PM (#19869898)
Plain old refcounting cannot resolve circular references, which are inevitably leaked. To avoid leaks, most refcounting garbage collectors have a heuristic to occasionally run traces to clear out the cruft.
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