14 Feb
2010
14 Feb
'10
8:27 a.m.
* Simon Marlow:
In a sense the GC *is* deterministic: it guarantees to collect all the unreachable garbage. But I expect what you're referring to is the fact that the garbage remains around for a non-deterministic amount of time. To me that doesn't seem to be a problem: you could run the GC at any time to reclaim it (pause-times notwithstanding).
Most of the time, the concern is about pause times and the lack of upper bounds on them. With traditional reference counting, this is still a problem because if the last reference to a large data structure goes away, you need to free the whole data structure at once. (I'm not sure if Axford's paper deals with that aspect, though.)