From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2007-11-08T23:59:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Unrecovered memory leak thoughts.

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 09:13:34PM +0900, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> > Anyway good luck to all.  Seems almost like it would be easier to just
> > write a reference counting GC than find this bug, should it be a bug
> > :)  I'd be willing to offer someone $100 US to build a reference
> > counting GC for 1.9 :)
> 
> Reference counting has a couple of unfortunate 'features'.
> 
> First, it's pretty inefficient in that it imposes an overhead on every
> variable assignment to adjust reference counts.  Second, it can easily
> leave permanently noncollectable constellations of  unreachable
> objects which form reference cycles.

I question how significant reference counting would be compared to
everything else going on in the interpreter.  Python uses reference
counting and seems to have decent performance compared to Ruby.

The bigger issue is that extension writers would have to rewrite their
extensions to increment the reference count when they do an assignment.

Paul