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GC researchers insist on conflating GC with all of automatic memory management. The public doesn't do this and neither does the article.

> Secondly, you know what's cheaper... Not doing anything at all.

These techniques are on the level of resetting a stack pointer or calling `sbrk()`. Incorporating them doesn't produce more-advanced GC schemes, it just means you neglected to consider similar allowances for RC.

The line of contention is at traversing the object graph and pausing threads.



Of course I have considered similar allowances for Rc (this has nothing to do with stack allocation by the way, I'm hoping this is not a misunderstanding on your part). I referenced RC Immix throughout the post. It is extremely clear that the author of the article did not consider such allowances because they do not see that there is a problem. Even if the author had done so, there is a big difference between saying "whatever, I could do that same thing for Rc!" and actually doing it--a hugely nontrivial one that has not been fully bridged until quite recently. These kinds of techniques are still not used in production languages with reference counting garbage collection, including Swift.




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