[swift-evolution] What about garbage collection?

[Charles Srstka]

> On Feb 8, 2016, at 1:56 PM, Félix Cloutier via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Has there been a garbage collection thread so far? I understand that reference counting vs. garbage collection can be a heated debate, but it might be relevant to have it.
> 
> It seems to me that the two principal upsides of reference counting are that destruction is (essentially) deterministic and performance is more easily predicted. However, it comes with many downsides:
> 
> object references are expensive to update
> object references cannot be atomically updated
> heap fragmentation
> the closure capture syntax uses up an unreasonable amount of mindshare just because of [weak self]
> 
> Since Swift doesn't expose memory management operations outside of `autoreleasepool`, it seems to me that you could just drop in a garbage collector instead of reference counting and it would work (for most purposes).
> 
> Has a GC been considered at all?
> 
> Félix
> 
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Strong -1. The deterministic nature of the refcounting system is one of Swift’s best features.

Charles

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