alt Hacker NewsA lot of frameworks that use variants of "mark and sweep" garbage collection instead of automatic reference counting are built with the assumption that RAM is cheap and CPU cycles aren't, so they are highly optimized CPU-wise, but otherwise are RAM inefficient.
I wonder if frameworks like dotnet or JVM will introduce reference counting as a way to lower the RAM footprint?
Replies
Unlikely. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think it's fairly likely that the RAM situation will have sorted itself out in a few years. Adding reference counting to the JVM and .NET would also take considerable time.
It makes more sense for application developers to think about the unnecessary complexity that they add to software.
That's not strictly true. Mark and sweep is tunable in ways ARC is not. You can increase frequency, reducing memory at the cost of increased compute, for example.
Reference counting in multithreaded systems is much more expensive than it sounds because of the synchronization overhead. I don't see it coming back. I don't think it saves massive amounts of memory, either, especially given my observation with vmmap upthread that in many cases the code itself is a dominant part of the (virtual) memory usage.