Talk:Reference counting

message: Since when has reference counting been called "garbage collection"?
I thought that the taxonomy was:
* Memory management
** Manual
** Automatic
*** Garbage collection
*** Reference counting
*** Region inference
*** etc...
:Academic literature has always called RC and tracing forms of GC. See http://gchandbook.org/ --31.53.77.28 (talk) 21:42, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Since when has reference counting been called "garbage collection"? 

message: * There's no "collector". In garbage collection there's code the purpose of which is detect and collect unused memory. This process typically runs in a separate thread, but it needs not. In reference counting there's no such code.
:The nearest equivalent with reference counting is the code that recursively decrements objects when the reference count of a parent reaches zero. In particular, this look is the source of naive reference counting's worst case unbounded pause times. --31.53.77.28 (talk) 21:47, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Reference counting usually is automatic (e.g. in Python, Mathematica and Erlang). Some languages allow reference counting to be used manually (e.g. shared_ptr in C++) at the peril of the programmer. --31.53.77.28 (talk) 21:47, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reasons why reference counting is not [[garbage collection]] 

message: wwww  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.228.222.34 (talk) 03:08, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Wwww, to yourself! ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 20:27, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  ww 

message: The COM section kind of a little contradicts itself by saying that:
:demonstrating the viability of reference counting in large-scale systems
while next explaining that
:Bugs caused by incorrect reference counting in COM systems are notoriously hard to resolve
and then explaining that
:Microsoft has abandoned reference counting in favor of tracing garbage collection for the .NET Framework.
The information is of course all true, except not very balanced. I think that "demonstrating the viability" is an advertizing statement, while "notoriously" demonstrate a detractor opinion. Could the truth be that a non-flawed system of perfect programmer discipline could theoretically use a reference counted distributed object system ("MiddleWare") of large scale, but that in real life of stressed careless programmers, this is an ephemeral state, and that then only a few fully trusted applications can be used. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 20:27, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  COM 

message: The term "disk operating system" keeps appearing in this article, but I also keep wondering if this term isn't obsolete and it should refer simply to "operating systems"? 84.209.121.30 (talk) 20:33, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disk Operating Systems 

message: The problem of fragmentation isn't mentioned at all in the article (it's only listed in the "Issues" at the bottom of the page). It would be great if somebody knowledgeable adds info about it. Ivant (talk) 21:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fragmentation 

message: The statement "reference counting requires every memory-managed object to reserve space for a reference count" isn't true. In Apple's Objective C implementation, the reference count is stored in a global hash table (see this forum post, for example) and then only for reference counts greater than 1.
--212.140.132.200 (talk) 12:49, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  reference counting requires every memory-managed object to reserve space for a reference count 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hi,
I'm a student. I'm having difficulty finding an accessible definition of a reference cycle. If a kind soul could link a page to a reference cycle or expand on the concept here on this page, it would help me and other students. 75.118.76.100 (talk) 16:06, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of a Reference Cycle