Swift uses reference counting
Slows down every access to objects as reference counts must be maintained
Something weird that I never bothered with to enable circular references
Slows down every access to objects as reference counts must be maintained
Something weird that I never bothered with to enable circular references
Usually access increases the reference count (to avoid the object getting GC'd while you use it) and weak pointers are the exception where you are prepared for the object reference to suddenly become invalid.
Taking shared ownership increases the reference count, not access.
Definitely not every access. Between an “increase refcount” and an “decrease refcount” you can access an object as many times as you want.
Also:
- static analysis can remove increase/decrease pairs.
- Swift structs are value types, and not reference counted. That means Swift code can have fewer reference-counted objects than similar Java code has garbage-collected objects.
It does perform slower than GC-ed languages or languages such as C and rust, but is easier to write [1] than rust and C and needs less memory than GC-ed languages.
[1] The latest Swift is a lot more complex than the original Swift, but high-level code still can be reasonably easy.