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by schumihan 5667 days ago
Reference count based GC? How would you deal with circular reference?
2 comments
eru 5667 days ago
You don't.

You'd avoid creating circular structures as much as possible. You can get pretty far that way.

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schumihan 5667 days ago
It's very difficult to avoid it when thing goes complicating. A may reference B, B may reference C, ... and somewhere, X may reference back to A. If this strategy makes sense for big project, many hackers work with C++ can use it either, as the performance overhead is very low.

But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage.

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eru 5666 days ago
> But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage.

And in theory it doesn't fare much better. Proper garbage collection can have better performance, and does the Right Thing.

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xsmasher 5667 days ago
Retain your children but not your parents; or do you mean a group of "peers" who retain each other? They should probably be in some kind of collection that retains them All.
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