[plt-scheme] Some thoughts about GC and realtime aplications

This is a perl developer's reasons for why Perl6 would be not be using 
reference counting (Perl5 does). 

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=193354

It's a wonderfully complete answer even though it lacks citations or 
benchmarks.

John Clements wrote:
>
> On May 19, 2006, at 11:09 AM, Ivan Boulanov wrote:
>
>>
>> Joe Marshall wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> This, I think, is the wrong approach.  If you trace a program that
>>> uses reference
>>> counts, you'll notice that it spends a good chunk of time 
>>> incrementing and
>>> decrementing the refcounters.  This is spread rather evenly 
>>> throughout the
>>> program, so it doesn't introduce noticable pauses, but it does take 
>>> up processor
>>> time.
>> I don`t really believe in that because I use smart pointers (read as 
>> "reference counting") everywhere I can and there is only a negligible 
>> overhead over raw pointers. Maybe I miss something?
>
> Both argument and counterargument here are in need of support; surely 
> there's lots of work on the time taken by reference-counting in 
> various programs?
>
> John
>
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