[MacRuby-devel] MacRuby and ARC was: Advice for Total Tyro

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi Perry,

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:44:56 -0700 Matt Aimonetti
> <mattaimonetti at gmail.com> wrote:
>> See my earlier reply, basically, you are right, it is technically
>> possible to change the way MacRuby works to use an automatic
>> reference counting approach.
>> But it's far from being trivial.
>
> Wouldn't reference counting radically change the behavior of Ruby in
> the presence of cycles though? It would no longer be exactly the same
> language -- libraries that used cyclic data structures internally
> would need to be rewritten.
>

Some people managed to have ref counting GCs that are able to deal with cycles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting#Dealing_with_reference_cycles

I also believe that CPython works similarly.

Laurent