[moonchild]

The majority of all GC research goes to java and (primarily the hotspot) jvm. ZGC and kin are like the zfs of garbage collectors: insanely good, but also insanely complex and not readily replicable. It's not practical to expect somebody with fewer resources than oracle to create something similar.

Reference-counting strategies are much easier to optimize; so if you have fewer resources available to throw at your compiler it's the way to go.

[pjmlp]

You mean tracing GC, as reference counting is still GC.

Adding value types and deterministic deallocation doesn't require endless GC research and was already available in languages like Mesa/Cedar and Oberon, features that Nim also has anyway.

[moonchild]

Reference counting is still GC, but I stand by what I said that the majority of all GC research goes into java. The GP was talking about using a tracing GC—like java uses—in nim; which I argue against.

[pjmlp]

Which is why Java is getting value types, as that research has proven that there is only so much that automatic escape analysis is capable of.

Bare bones tracing GC in Java were the state of the art like 25 years ago.

Java GC's are powering quite some interesting stuff, one just needs to open their mind beyond OpenJDK.

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

https://www.aicas.com/wp/

Still eventually, even Java would enjoy the value types and determnistic destruction capablities of languages like D, or to go to the days before Java, languages like Modula-3 and Eiffel, which they should have paid more attention to for Java 1.0.