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> As far as I can tell, the idea of (explicit) reference counting came from Next, Maybe in objc, but in the general case I kinda doubt this. It's a very common
by asveikau 6y ago
> As far as I can tell, the idea of (explicit) reference counting came from Next,
Maybe in objc, but in the general case I kinda doubt this. It's a very common pattern in kernel development as an example, haven't done any archeology here but I have seen it in codebases rooted in the 80s at latest, probably earlier. (Did original Unix reference count file objects in the FD table the same way a modern kernel would? Would not be surprised if yes.)
Autorelease is pretty unique though and clever.
- herodotus 6y agoGood point. I really meant reference counting as implemented in the Objective-C runtime architecture.
- pmcjones 6y agoI believe this is the first paper to describe reference counting: George E. Collins. A method for overlapping and erasure of lists. Commun. ACM 3, 12 (Dec. 1960), 655–657. https://doi.org/10.1145/367487.367501 https://doi.org/10.1145/367487.367501