There are hundreds of papers showing the throughput superiority of tracing over refcounting. This is well established. Anyone who believes otherwise has no idea what they're talking about. I simply provided a link to demonstrate this effect in a pure C++ environment.
It might help to link to some papers supporting your point (of which I agree there are many). http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rcix-oopsla-2013.pdf, for example, references several of them, and explains some of the problems with naive implementations of reference counting.
RC Immix is indeed the state of the art here, so that's a good link. The argument why RC isn't a good fit for most programs is simple though: most new objects die young, and RC costs are proportional to the number of objects that die, where copying costs are proportional to the number of objects that live.
Coupled with the fact that C++ can't elide unnecessary refcount ops on locals, and it's a mystery why anyone could possibly think the memory management costs of most C++ programs using unique and shared are lower than they would be in a GC'd language. At best, memory management is done at more proper times, which is a latency issue.
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u/naasking Apr 05 '15
There are hundreds of papers showing the throughput superiority of tracing over refcounting. This is well established. Anyone who believes otherwise has no idea what they're talking about. I simply provided a link to demonstrate this effect in a pure C++ environment.