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by bd_at_rivenhill 4041 days ago
I think we will start to see less use of GCs in mobile going forward, especially now that Apple has deprecated GC in favor of automatic reference counting. The issues caused by the interaction between the memory hierarchy and the fragmentation that is naturally introduced by GC are difficult to measure, but nevertheless an important component of performance.
2 comments

Reference counting is still not the same as manual memory management, and there is a heavy cost to reference counting as well. Reference counting trades throughput for latency relative to a garbage collected runtime.
Lets not forget they did that, because they failed to produce a stable working GC for Objective-C.
Lets not forget Java failed to produce that too, they just dont seem to care. :)
I didn't notice that JVM's GC do segfault all the time, with erratic behaviour depending on the libraries being linked.
A performant GC for mobile is inherently a much harder problem than for servers.