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I imagine, even C compilers will soon start supporting automatic ref-counted version of compilation for old codes.
by ramshanker 6y ago
I imagine, even C compilers will soon start supporting automatic ref-counted version of compilation for old codes.
- pjmlp 6y agoFirst they would need to finally adopt one of the many available secure string libraries.
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoWhile it does depend on the C project, in general it's not the sort of language you can really retrofit pervasive refcounting into automatically. Even if it worked, I think the set of people currently using C who would be willing to switch to such a system, but hadn't already moved to another language or started using Bohm, must be quite small at this point.
- moonchild 6y agoTracing GC involves unpredictable pauses. RC does not (or, at least, has a much lower incidence rate).
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoYes, but (conservative) tracing GC doesn't require invasively updating the contents of all your data structures, in exchange for not actually capturing all pointer relationships. In C, it's often not really possible or even safe to do that, so I don't see how such a method could work automatically except in very restricted settings.
- yencabulator 6y agoReference counter drop can lead to an unpredictable amount of freeing. Consider dropping the last reference to the root of a varying-size large tree.