asm & tamsyn & forth, oh my! (millihertz@oldbytes.space)'s status on Friday, 10-Mar-2023 16:51:52 JST

@clacke the only GC technology that really plays nicely with (a) virtual memory, and (b) being a userspace process is refcounting, because it doesn't need global knowledge. but because it doesn't have global knowledge, it also can't collect cycles (although that problem has been worked on - basically, tracing any object whose refcount has been decremented to a non-zero value can identify it as part of a cycle) and can't make assumptions about which objects it can treat as private (forcing all refcount ops to be globally synchronised - hence Apple's M1 optimising this at the silicon level, because it can't be optimised anywhere else)