3 ms·

One of my favorite papers by Bacon et al expands on this intuition that garbage collection and reference counting are opposite tradeoffs in many respects, and g

• pron 6y ago
  That's a great paper, but one important thing to point out is that some production-grade tracing GCs are on the sophisticated end of that paper, while almost all reference counting GCs are on the rather primitive end. Given the same amount of effort, it's easier to get a reasonable result with reference-counting, but there are industrial-strength tracing GCs out there that have had a lot of effort put into them.