A couple garbage collector questions

[Greg Ewing]

Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> 
> Reference-counting exacts very heavy performance costs, no matter what
> you back it up with.

Something nobody has mentioned yet is that RC is cache-friendly,
whereas pure M&S is quite cache-hostile. This is important
now that most machine architectures are heavily reliant
on cacheing for good performance, and I believe that it is
one of the main reasons for retaining RC alongside the new
GC mechanisms.

The other reason is backwards compatibility with existing
extension modules.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg