> - no sharing across threads, otherwise locking is required for refcount updates
If you are sharing across threads you will need a synchronization mechanism, whether you have reference counting or not.
So it's not exactly fair to assign this cost to reference counting.
General reference counting does make adding or removing a reference a read/write operation, though of course non-naive implementations don't do this at every turn. Not to mention tracing GC has a reference cost as well.
If you are sharing across threads you will need a synchronization mechanism, whether you have reference counting or not.
So it's not exactly fair to assign this cost to reference counting.
General reference counting does make adding or removing a reference a read/write operation, though of course non-naive implementations don't do this at every turn. Not to mention tracing GC has a reference cost as well.