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Re: Pliant and ref counting


GH> I'm going to be pedantic, and point out that ref counting is a form of
GH> garbage collection ;) Ref counting can work quite well when you have a
GH> large set of `simple' data (most importantly, no circular references),
GH> which I guess describes a database pretty well.

What about the issue of space utilization? Which scheme (not in the
guile sense!) is most space efficient? If most data is stored in
immediate types, only a couple of bits per datum is sacrificed in Guile,
whereas in ref-counting systems you have to have something like a word 
for each datum. Or am I missing something? How much does
non-ref-counting GC cost in space utilization?

	Lars

-- 
Lars Arvestad               Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
                       Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden