<div dir="ltr">(Sorry, Felix; I screwed up my original email and didn't send it to the list.)<div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Having the option of a GC would be interesting, but one consideration among many: how would it work with the COW value type collections? It seems those would rule out a tracing garbage collector in practice, and the only 'real' option would be RC + a cycle detector?</span><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:56 AM, Félix Cloutier <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" target="_blank">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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:</div><div><br></div><div><ul><li>object references are expensive to update</li><li>object references cannot be atomically updated</li><li>heap fragmentation</li><li>the closure capture syntax uses up an unreasonable amount of mindshare just because of [weak self]</li></ul></div><div><div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>Has a GC been considered at all?</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div>
<br><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Lucida Grande';font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;display:inline!important;float:none">Félix</span>
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