bill@ibmpcug.co.uk (Bill Birch) (11/29/89)
Sirs, Your discussion of incremental garbage collection interested me. I have implemented a LISP interpreter which uses "erasure by reference-counting" instead of garbage collection. I use this in conjunction with MIDI, because I can get reliable response times from LISP. In doing this I have tried to collect as many papers about reference-counting LISP systems as possible. Unfortunately the trail of papers has gone cold, it seems reference-counting was discarded as early as 1958. Does anyone have references to papers describing reference-counting? I would be grateful for some help on this one. Thanks in advance, Bill Birch ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tel: + 44 1 637 9111 x 1311 (Work) Snail: Flat 7, 1 Brookfield Ave. Sutton, SM1 3QP, U.K. -- Automatic Disclaimer: The views expressed above are those of the author alone and may not represent the views of the IBM PC User Group.
bill@ibmpcug.co.uk (Bill Birch) (01/03/90)
This is a summary of the replies I received to my enquiries about "erasure by reference-counting". Apparently reference-counting is alive and kicking in Smalltalk-80's garbage collector. It has also been used in Xerox's Interlisp. A source of references is "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" by Simon L. Peyton Jones. Thanks are due to the following: Ray Fink, Robert Strandh, Mike Gigante, Peter Norvig, dmfloy, Keiji Kanazawa and kythera. Regards, Bill Birch -- Automatic Disclaimer: The views expressed above are those of the author alone and may not represent the views of the IBM PC User Group.