> Reference counting is garbage collecting
I am drawing a blank on google scholar at the moment, but I recall a very popular paper on exactly this topic of RC as the other side of Tracing GC.
I am drawing a blank on google scholar at the moment, but I recall a very popular paper on exactly this topic of RC as the other side of Tracing GC.
I feel like once you stop and think about it, the distinction between a 'tracing' GC and a 'non-tracing' GC is specious: To do its work at acquire and release, RC collector must in fact trace a tree of objects. It's just that the semantics of how this is declared might differ, or, more specifically the time(s) in which it does this work.