From: Piers Cawley Date: 2001-10-24T16:38:33+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23147] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby Eric Lee Green writes: > 9. Reference counting (Python) is more memory-efficient than garbage > collection (Ruby), since it frees up memory as references are > destroyed rather than waiting until a garbage collector runs. > Python does need a garbage collector to collect circularly- > referenced objects though, so Python's lack of garbage collection > overhead has to be offset by the fact that circular references > currently hang around forever. You should also offset it by the fact that non reference counting garbage collection is more computationally efficient than reference counting, which requires housekeeping every time a reference is created, and at the end of every scope. Short lived variables are especially annoying. Over in Perl 6 land, Dan Sugalski is currently reasonably confident that he's got a garbage collection scheme that will allow for computation efficiency for most things, combined with immediate destruction/resource cleanup for things that need it. Which sounds too good to be true, but Dan is a clever man; if he gets this working in Parrot I can see a lot of other people pinching it... -- Piers