Comment by pjmlp

19 hours ago

Reference counting is a GC algorithm from CS point of view, as looking into any worthwhile reference will show.

7 comments

pjmlp

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furyofantares  19 hours ago

It's not what people mean when they say GC though, especially in reference to games, where you care about your peak frame time more than about your average frame time.

  • munificent  17 hours ago

    Reference counting can also have very bursty performance. Consider what happens when you decrement the last reference to an object which is the sole remaining reference to an entire large tree of other objects. This will trigger a whole cascade of subsequent decrements and deallocations, which can be arbitrarily large.

    Of course, you might say, "Well, sure, but your reference counting implementation doesn't need to eagerly deallocate on dereference." That's true! You can write a ref counter that defers some of those deallocations or amortizes them across multiple operations.

    And when you do that, now you really do have a garbage collector.

    See: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-g...

  • tracker1  19 hours ago

    You should watch some of the more recent Gamers Nexus videos... the average frame pacing counts for a lot, and they're making a concerted effort to show this, as it does represent the level of "jank" in games very well.