I thought most of us agreed by now that ref-counting is slower than GC? http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Com

I thought most of us agreed by now that ref-counting is slower than GC? http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html cites a paper empirically showing just that. I quote: " In a well known paper [2] several widely used programs (including perl and ghostscript) were adapted to use several different allocators including a garbage collector masquerading as malloc (with a dummy free()). The garbage collector was as fast as a typical malloc/free; perl was one of several programs that ran faster when converted to use a garbage collector." And this is just with single-threaded performance! I really hope both unladen swallow and macruby succeed in their goals of removing the GIL from their respective scripting languages, and I suspect that the numbers will prove that python gets better performance with a GC as opposed to reference counting.