Slightly off-topic, I recall Dennis Ritchie talking about the Plan9 garbage collection system, which (IIRC) balanced a fairly aggressive reference counter against a very mellow mark-and-sweep system. The basic idea was that the ref counter would do most of the heavy lifting, with the mark-and-sweep system getting rid of the rare loop before too awfully long.

In reply to Re: Why bother with the mark and sweep garbage collection on non-embedded interpreter shutdown? by mstone
in thread Why bother with the mark and sweep garbage collection on non-embedded interpreter shutdown? by dynamo

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