[swift-evolution] What about garbage collection?

[Chris Lattner]

> On Feb 9, 2016, at 4:29 PM, Greg Parker via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 9, 2016, at 9:45 AM, David Waite via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Feb 9, 2016, at 7:35 AM, Jean-Denis Muys via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I find it interesting that the commonly accepted wisdom is that GC is the right thing to do. To quote but one blog post I’ve read:
>>> 
>>>> It’s a long since resolved dispute, and GC won. I don’t want Steve Jobs to reach out from the grave and drag us back to the 70s. There’s nothing special about mobile phones: they are more powerful than the computers that GC won on in the first place.
>> 
>> I looked up that article (http://www.lshift.net/blog/2013/09/19/the-great-gc-vs-reference-counting-debate/ <http://www.lshift.net/blog/2013/09/19/the-great-gc-vs-reference-counting-debate/>) and it has several logical fallacies, including the obvious one that reference counting is not a form of GC!
> 
> Counter-pedantry: Reference counting *with an automatic cycle collector* is GC. ARC-style reference counting is not GC.

I don’t really want to get into a terminology debate, but by pretty much any well accepted definition, ARC is an algorithm for GC.  As one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29#Reference_counting

-Chris

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