Chris Lattner on garbage collection vs. Automatic Reference Counting (2017)
I develop languages full time, and it&#x27;s clear to me that RC will make <i>massive</i> strides forward in the next decade, for a few reasons:<p>1. First-class regions allow us to skip a surprising amount of RC overhead. [0]<p>2. There are entire new fields of static analysis coming out, such as in Lobster which does something like an automatic borrow checker. [1]<p>3. For immutable data, a lot of options open up, such as the static lazy cloning done by HVM [2] and the in-place updates in Perceus&#x2F;Koka [3]<p>Buckle up yall, it&#x27;s gonna be a wild ride!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;verdagon.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;zero-cost-refs-regions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;verdagon.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;zero-cost-refs-regions</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aardappel.github.io&#x2F;lobster&#x2F;memory_management.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aardappel.github.io&#x2F;lobster&#x2F;memory_management.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Kindelia&#x2F;HVM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Kindelia&#x2F;HVM</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;perceus-garbage-free-reference-counting-with-reuse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;perceus...</a>