[Haskell-cafe] Re: How many "Haskell Engineer I/II/III"s are there?

[Florian Weimer]

* Simon Marlow:

> In a sense the GC *is* deterministic: it guarantees to collect all the
> unreachable garbage.  But I expect what you're referring to is the
> fact that the garbage remains around for a non-deterministic amount of
> time. To me that doesn't seem to be a problem: you could run the GC at
> any time to reclaim it (pause-times notwithstanding).

Most of the time, the concern is about pause times and the lack of
upper bounds on them.  With traditional reference counting, this is
still a problem because if the last reference to a large data
structure goes away, you need to free the whole data structure at
once.  (I'm not sure if Axford's paper deals with that aspect,
though.)