Re: Best Ref-counting algorithms?

Christoffer LernC6 wrote:
> I'm looking into GC using ref-counting.
>
> Does anyone know what passes for state-of-the-art when it comes to ref-
> counting algorithms?
> I've read papers by Lins 2003 "Lazy Cyclic Reference Counting",
> Bacon / Rajan 2001 "Concurrent Cycle Collection in Reference Counted
> Systems" and a few others.
>
> If one would like to implement a fast GC using refcounting, should I
> implement something like in those papers, or are there better
> algorithms out there?


It depends on what resources you want to collect, and what
implementation language you are choosing. If resources that should
take a place at a specific time, like open files that should be closed
in a C++ style destructor, that may force ordinary reference counts,
as it may be hard to detect the point in time the last reference is
used.


A quick scan on the first paper above gives the impression that it
uses a mark-scan from the root set. If the implementation language is
C++, the problem is that there is no good way to find this root set
(but perhaps in the next revision); the language does not
cooperate. But if one can find it, any type of GC would do.


The approaches might be combined: reference counts for the
destructors, and another GC to collect the memory resources (with
finalizers).


      Hans

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