[MUD-Dev] New Beginings

David B. Held dheld at codelogicconsulting.com
Tue Jun 4 21:33:24 CEST 2002


From: "Lars Duening" <lars at bearnip.com>


> Every time a programmer uses a tracking mechanism for memory
> allocations - and this includes manually managed reference
> counters - he or she is using a GC. So for a complex program like
> a MUD engine, the question is not whether to use GC or not, but
> rather where to use it and how to give it optimum efficiency.

I disagree that refcounting == GC.  The point of GC is that you
*don't* know how many references to a given object exist until you
manually check.  In a sufficiently vague sense you could say that
refcounting is a form of GC, but I don't see that as being very
useful.

> Furthermore, when freeing deeply nested datastructures there is
> always the chance of the driver running out of stack space and
> crash (it did happen!).

I seriously doubt this is a flaw of refcounting.  It is most likely
an artifact of your implementation.

Dave


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