GC (was: kaffe-0.8.x garbage collection problem (at least on m68k))

[Tim Wilkinson]

Frank,

On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, Frank Mehnert wrote:

> BTW: Tim, do you have think about reference counters (a counter in each
> object says how much other objects point to it - if this counter becomes
> Zero the GC can kill the object. Like hard links in UNIX)? With this
> kaffe wouldn't have to scan through the stacks. The only problem would be
> cyclic lists. But they are not to often in Java?

There are infact a suprising number of simple Java structure which are
cyclic (list of objects which contains pointers to the head of the list
for example).  Strictly speaking (I believe) you could use reference counting
and ignore cyclic garbage, but I don't see what advantage this would
really be.

Tim

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  Tim Wilkinson                         Tel/Fax: +44 181 440 0658
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