Re: Garbage Collection

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> Everybody refers to reference counting as though it cannot catch cyclic
> structures. Rafael Lins, whom I believe is now in the Departamento de
> Electronica e Sistemas at the Universidade de Pernambuco, produced
> some beautiful gc reference counting algorithms that do catch cyclic
> structures. See "Cyclic Reference Counting with Lazy Mark-Scan", UKC
> Technical Report 75 (1991). I believe he is now a world-expert on gc,
> and has co-authored books on the topic. Seek advice from your eminent
> compatriots, ye progenitors of Lua.

I know him quite well, but I could never "extract" from him the details
of this algorithm about cyclic reference counting. Curiosly, his main
book about garbage collection (which is, I believe, *the* book about
garbage collection) is from 1996 (so, five years after that paper), but
it does not include that algorithm...

-- Roberto