Allowing ref counting to close file items bad style?

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "sjdevnull at yahoo.com" <sjdevnull at yahoo.com> writes:
> > I disagree strongly with this assertion.  It's not as efficient overall
> > as other GC implementations, but it's not a case of "less efficient to
> > do the same task".  Reference counting buys you deterministic GC in the
> > pretty common case where you do not have circular references--and
> > determinism is very valuable to programmers.  Other GCs be faster, but
> > they don't actually accomplish the same task.
>
> GC is supposed to create the illusion that all objects stay around
> forever.  It releases unreachable objects since the application can't
> tell whether those objects are gone or not.

No, that's not true of all GC implementations.  Refcounting
implementations give much nicer deterministic guarantees.