Re^3: releasing memory from a loop in Windows

IMHO it uses "reference counting garbage collection". You don't have to allocate and deallocate memory, do you? I don't see why would the term "garbage collection" be used only for the "mark&sweep" and "copying" types.

Except maybe that Microsoft, for marketing purposes, wanted people to believe .Net has something old VB did not have. So instead of saying that .Net has a mark&sweep garbage collector, while VB used a reference counting one, they want everyone to think, .Net has garbage collection, while VB did not.

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Comment on Re^3: releasing memory from a loop in Windows

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Re^4: releasing memory from a loop in Windows by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Aug 07, 2006 at 22:06 UTC
It's not just your opinion that considers "reference counting" as just one of several methods of implementing "gargabe collection", and the trend for Perlists to disown the term "garbage collection" as false elitism. See wikipedia "Reference counting" where the first application of "Reference counting" is "Garbage collection". See also Wikipedia "Garbage collection"/"Reference counting" where RCGC is contrasted with "Tracing GC". See also Wikipedia "Garbage Collection"/"Implementations" where is says: Script languages like Perl, Ruby, Python and PHP tend to have built-in support of GC. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal? "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.	[reply]
Re^5: releasing memory from a loop in Windows by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 07, 2006 at 23:07 UTC
The Wikipedia articles are confusing and/or very vague. "Garbage collection (computer science)" defines garbage collection as "a form of automatic memory management." (The rest of the article is about garbage collectors.) The same article also calls reference counting a form of automatic memory management. "The garbage collector attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory used by objects that will never again be accessed or mutated by the application." further confuses the issue, since garbage never exists in Perl according to that definition. The memory is freed as the point where it would become garbage. But that's all irrelevant here. It's clear it considers reference counting a type of garbage collection. I was led to believe GC refered specifically to asynchronous memory reclamation, but that's apparently false. My post has been corrected.	[reply]