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Because it is deterministic? (i'm just guessing that what you call "proper" garbage collector is non-deterministic).

Furthermore, the only "advantage" I see in garbage collectors is that they can deal with cycles.

I say "advantage" because i'm of the strong opinion that having a cycle in your code is a software design error.

Say you are implementing a self-tracking objects model for data management. How do you fix the reversal of control required to manage that? Specifically you need to go from the representative object to the controller to store the fact that you changed.

Could you elaborate?

Entity Framework, when you modify an object it stores in a central location what the change was to be written out to a location latter.

It is performance wise infeasible to avoid that circular reference because it is very easy to pull back a lot of data from entity framework and change none of it.

Weak ptr/reference.

Also I would say that it's very uncommon to do/need something like this so it shouldn't be cited as an reason for cycles to be generally handled.

I have done weak pointer logic, it is not pretty.

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