That may well be. I’d say I understand the basic concepts, but people in this thread have more detail on the specifics and how they work out in practice than me.
It does make me wonder why everyone hasn’t been doing it, if there’s no drawbacks, though.
It is being used. Objective-C (used for macOS and iOS apps) has used reference counting since the language was created. Originally it was manual, but since 2011 it’s been automatic by default. And Swift (which basically replaced Objective-C) only supports ARC (does not support manual reference counting). The downside is that it doesn’t handle loops so the programmer has to be careful to prevent those. Also, the compiler has to insert reference increment and decrement calls, and that’s a significant engineering challenge for the compiler designers. Rust tracks ownership instead of references, but that means it’s compiler is even more complicated. Rust’s system is a little bit like compile-time reference counting, but that’s not really accurate. Apparently Python, Pearl, and PHP use reference counting, plus tracing GC (aka ‘normal’ GC) in Python and PHP to handle cycles. So your implicit statement/assumption that reference counting is not widely used is false. Based on what I can find online, Python and JavaScript are by far the most used languages today and are roughly equal, so in that respect reference counting GC is equally or possibly more popular than pure tracing GC.
That may well be. I’d say I understand the basic concepts, but people in this thread have more detail on the specifics and how they work out in practice than me.
It does make me wonder why everyone hasn’t been doing it, if there’s no drawbacks, though.
It is being used. Objective-C (used for macOS and iOS apps) has used reference counting since the language was created. Originally it was manual, but since 2011 it’s been automatic by default. And Swift (which basically replaced Objective-C) only supports ARC (does not support manual reference counting). The downside is that it doesn’t handle loops so the programmer has to be careful to prevent those. Also, the compiler has to insert reference increment and decrement calls, and that’s a significant engineering challenge for the compiler designers. Rust tracks ownership instead of references, but that means it’s compiler is even more complicated. Rust’s system is a little bit like compile-time reference counting, but that’s not really accurate. Apparently Python, Pearl, and PHP use reference counting, plus tracing GC (aka ‘normal’ GC) in Python and PHP to handle cycles. So your implicit statement/assumption that reference counting is not widely used is false. Based on what I can find online, Python and JavaScript are by far the most used languages today and are roughly equal, so in that respect reference counting GC is equally or possibly more popular than pure tracing GC.