For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by blub on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:26PM (#19869675)

And we did eliminate them.

But no one can seriously claim that GC is a magic bullet, because it's only clearly winning against plain C.

Carefully designed, popular languages are choosing RAII and reference counting implementations and those are very competitive.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by mcguire on Thursday May 09, 2019 @01:16PM (#19870136)

C++ and Objective C inherited C's memory model and thus don't have a good memory management option. Rust is explicitly a systems language, meaning stronger memory models are out of scope, and then inherited most of C++'s idioms.

Other than those, what popular languages are specifically choosing reference counting as a primary GC method?

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by steveklabnik on Thursday May 09, 2019 @01:20PM (#19870163)

Swift.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by pjmlp on Friday May 10, 2019 @07:36AM (#19876807)

Swift requires reference counting for compatibility with Objective-C code.

Apple could have gone the .NET way (RCW) to interface with COM reference counting, but that naturally would complicate the bindings to Objective-C runtime and existing libraries.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by mcguire on Thursday May 09, 2019 @02:36PM (#19870897)

Which inherits its memory management from Objective C.

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