My thoughts on ref counting are really academic.  I am not arguing for
anything.  I don't even know where these thoughts are leading.  But...

It seems to me that there are two distinctly seperate goals of garbage
collection:
	1) Free up memory
	2) Finalize objects.

Obviously goal 1 is better done with lazy processing.  That is the Java/Ruby
GC approach.  Goal 2 is better done with ref counting.

Most objects need goal 1 (not all, but most).  Only a few objects need goal
2.  Having goal 2 be met by an optional feature that costs more overhead,
only on objects that need it, would be logical.

-----Original Message-----
From: Yukihiro Matsumoto [mailto:matz / ruby-lang.org]
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 10:28 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: [ruby-talk:26746] Re: [OT] Re: KDE or GNOME curiosity
question...


Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:26544] Re: [OT] Re: KDE or GNOME curiosity
question..."
    on 01/11/27, "mark hahn" <mchahn / facelink.com> writes:

|> Circular references will cause the object to stay around indefinitely
|
|I was thinking of the reference counting as being totally seperate from gc.
|So ref counting would have no effect one way or the other as to how long
|objects "stay around".  The only effect of the ref counting would be to
call
|the special method which is not the gc finalizer.  I don't have a name for
|this method yet, maybe "pre-finalizer"?

Hmm, I'm not sure how it works and how much useful.  At least implicit
ref counting requires write barrier opened.

							matz.