<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 9, 2016, at 4:29 PM, Greg Parker via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 9, 2016, at 9:45 AM, David Waite via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 9, 2016, at 7:35 AM, Jean-Denis Muys via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">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:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><span style="color: rgb(35, 31, 32); font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13.888888359069824px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">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.</span></blockquote></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div>I looked up that article (<a href="http://www.lshift.net/blog/2013/09/19/the-great-gc-vs-reference-counting-debate/" class="">http://www.lshift.net/blog/2013/09/19/the-great-gc-vs-reference-counting-debate/</a>) and it has several logical fallacies, including the obvious one that reference counting is not a form of GC!</div></div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div class="">Counter-pedantry: Reference counting *with an automatic cycle collector* is GC. ARC-style reference counting is not GC.</div></div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>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:</div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29#Reference_counting" class="">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29#Reference_counting</a></div><div><br class=""></div><div>-Chris</div><br class=""></body></html>