[BlackFingolfin]

I'd love to see that reference, as I've not yet seen an example where this was true in practicd, but know several examples where it is definitely false (e.g. we use a modification of the Julia GC which uses consevative stack scanning to allow interop with another system, and it seems to perform very well).

[FullyFunctional]

Sorry for the late follow up. Hopefully you're still around to notice. Apparently there was previous HN discussion on this, but I haven't seen it (or looked for it): https://www.excelsiorjet.com/blog/articles/conservative-gc-i...

[gmueckl]

I think that only scanning the stack conservatively should not change much from a completely precise GC. The chances of misidentifying a potential reference to an enormous data structure that is collectable are pretty slim in a memory region as small as a typical stack.

Scanning the entire heap is different because of its generally much bigger size. It's far more likely then to see references where there are none.