Action Script 3 Memory Management

I've been developing relatively large and complex games on the Flash platform for a while (see: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com), and if I put into words just how badly made I think the entire platform is, I would expect to get written off as a troll.

With that said, the garbage collection is actually pretty decent. It's one of the few (perhaps only) parts of the entire ecosystem where I've never found any hair pulling, WTF worthy bugs.

> Making sure every "new" was matched by a "delete" was tedious but absolutely necessary

Anyone who thinks this is necessary should check out boost::shared_ptr, weak_ptr, and scoped_ptr:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/libs/smart_ptr/smart_pt...

C++ has been around long enough to have had several distinct epochs of style and best practice. It's not necessary to do much manual heap management in modern C++.

And the subtle upside of using ref-counting is that the ownership and lifetime of your data becomes self-evident in the types. It takes awhile to appreciate that, but it makes garbage collection feel a bit like dynamic typing: yes, it requires you to think less, and there are heroic, inspiring optimizations behind it, but ultimately makes it harder to understand the runtime behavior based on just looking at the code.

This post is interesting because he's identifying those limitations of GC: he's ending up having to add reference management to his GC code, by making sure to null out references, etc. It's nice to have the type system do that for you.

I am really not sure about the tip #1. Isn't that the main advantage for GC when comparing to reference counting because it can recognize circular referencing etc?