Re: Promptness of collection

Dear Jon -- I think the difference you're mentioning
has more to do with differences in the smartness of
analysis in different compilers than something
fundamental about different GC algorithms.  The C++
compilers probably aren't as "smart" about noting
when a variable becomes dead, and end up deferring
the reference count work to the end of the call.
This may also be effectively required by C/C++
semantics, in which case I blame it on the language,
and again not on the GC algorithm per se.

Compilers for functional languages tend to emphasize
these kinds of analyses since they allocate so many
objects implicitly, which makes the optimizations
more important to obtaining good performance at all.

In sum, I think it's compiler and language differences,
not the different GC algorithms.

Regards -- Eliot