Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
3 points by kens 5846 days ago | link | parent

I thought the big problem with refcounting was circular data structures. (Arc supports those, but I haven't seen anything actually use them.)

Which brings to mind the Lisp koan (http://www.lisp.org/humor/ai-koans.html):

One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons." Moon patiently told the student the following story-

    "One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector...


1 point by almkglor 5846 days ago | link

Which is why there's a backup GC. The point however is that circular data structures are pretty rare anyway. Always optimize for the common case.

-----