7 ms·

Reference count based GC? How would you deal with circular reference?

• eru 16y ago
  You don't. You'd avoid creating circular structures as much as possible. You can get pretty far that way.
  • schumihan 16y ago
    It's very difficult to avoid it when thing goes complicating. A may reference B, B may reference C, ... and somewhere, X may reference back to A. If this strategy makes sense for big project, many hackers work with C++ can use it either, as the performance overhead is very low. But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage.
    • eru 16y ago
      > But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage. And in theory it doesn't fare much better. Proper garbage collection can have better performance, and does the Right Thing.
• xsmasher 16y ago
  Retain your children but not your parents; or do you mean a group of "peers" who retain each other? They should probably be in some kind of collection that retains them All.