Re: Promptness of collection

On 12 March 2013 14:45, Jon Harrop <[email protected]> wrote:

> Has anyone tried to quantify the promptness of recovery of real reference
> counting garbage collectors and compared them to other garbage collections
> (e.g. generational mark-sweep)?
>

The variant of Very Concurrent Garbage Collector used in Inferno for Limbo
programs (on the Dis virtual machine) is the backup to reference-counting
collection,
and it's easy to see that it is prompt, because the closing of files and
associated resources, including network connections and visible windows
on the screen, relies on the collection of (non-cyclical) data being
prompt. In other words, were a reference to dangle,
a file will not be closed, and a network connection will linger or a window
will remain on the screen.