GC performance - was Re: [gclist] GC topics

[Charles Fiterman]

> 
> "I suspect I'm missing something ... But, it would seem that the presence of
> a and b as arguments would guarantee the existence of pointers to a and b
> either within the stack or within the caller of dist.  Or are compilers so
> clever that they can optimize away all the obvious references.  (Apologies
> if this is discussed in your thesis)."

foo(malloc(10));

foo has a pointer argument which exists nowhere but its argument list.
Arguments can be functions and functions can allocate new data and return it.