[gclist] zillion objects and gc

[Andrew Chen]

At 7:49 AM -0500 8/29/01, Charles Fiterman wrote:
>  >That only helps for known leaf objects.  When you drop the last
>>reference to an object, the refcounter must scan it to find all the
>>pointers, decrement all the associated reference counts, and recurse
>>if necessary.  If this object was the root of a large structure,
>>that's a lot of memory which a tracing collector would never have
>>touched.  Even if you have code to avoid traversing leaf objects, this
>>is still a big lose for reference counting.
>
>In a strongly typed language you could isolate objects which could never be
>part of a reference cycle. This works even better if the language has
>special knowledge of some data structures.

Has anyone tried to do the above-mentioned technique dynamically/adaptively?

I'm thinking specifically of Java with it's strong typing but dynamic 
loading of (potentially) new types.

-- 
Andrew Chen
Graduate Student, Michigan State University
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~chenandr/