Chris Lattner on garbage collection vs. Automatic Reference Counting (2017)
I develop languages full time, and it's clear to me that RC will make massive strides forward in the next decade, for a few reasons:1. First-class regions allow us to skip a surprising amount of RC overhead. [0]2. There are entire new fields of static analysis coming out, such as in Lobster which does something like an automatic borrow checker. [1]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/Koka [3]Buckle up yall, it's gonna be a wild ride![0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-refs-regions[1] https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html[2] https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/perceus...