[marshray]

It's an interesting problem that will probably never be solved, only optimized and amortized. That makes it good for papers!

The most efficient scheme probably is a "stop the world" system. The regular program might mutate concurrently and the GC could indeed be concurrent, but making them run at the same time is a real challenge.

Of course, people don't like it when their app pauses.

I think it's noteworthy that there never was a big office suite or even a web browser written primarily in a GC system, despite many years of promises.

[rayiner]

Re: office suites, the code bases of the major office suites pre-date the rise of Java, which brought GC into the mainstream. Lot's of apps bigger and more complex than an office suite have been written in Java.

As for web browsers... every web browser has a GC...

[marshray]

office suites, the code bases of the major office suites pre-date the rise of Java, which brought GC into the mainstream.

Yes, but Java and GC proponents talked up the possibility at the time. There were various projects to do pure-java office suites and web browsers. The time or two I tried them they were memory pigs and slow.

Lot's of apps bigger and more complex than an office suite have been written in Java.

Many that take take heavy user interactivity? Eclipse perhaps, but IBM had to come up with a custom native-code UI toolkit to implement it. I still considered it too slow to use until the last year or so.

As for web browsers... every web browser has a GC...

Last I looked (a long time ago) my impression was that DOM and Javascript interpreter objects were usually refcounted internally. Did this changed?