[gclist] Finalizers & Reference counting.

[Charles Fiterman]

At 09:30 AM 8/27/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>Let's be clear what we are comparing.  If you buy into RC - uniprocessor or no
>- you are agreeing to pay an overhead at every pointer assignment.  That's an
>overhead GC doesn't have, and it's been a good argument for GC's efficiency
>for years.

We must also be clear what the requirements are.

Suppose you are GotRocks Inc and can have lots of processors and lots of 
storage but you must finish 90% of transactions in 1 second and the rest in 
10 seconds. Suppose you are looking at a back end database server.

Now the costs of reference counting can be beaten by having more 
processors. But the costs of collection are a huge lump right where it 
hurts. Collection can only be subdivided so far because of cross pointers.