Implementing the Perceus reference counting GC

1

OCaml

Reference counting (RC) has rather been a minor party to the other garbage collection (GC) algorithms in functional programming in the last decades as, for example, OCaml and Haskell use non-RC GC. However, several recent papers, such as Counting Immutable Beans: Reference Counting Optimized for Purely Functional Programming and Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse, showed the efficiency of highly optimized RC GC in functional languages with sacrifice or restriction of some language features like circular references. The latter paper introduced an efficient RC GC algorithm called Perceus which is basically all-in-one RC.

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2

Elm

When your language has record types and syntax for record field access, things might be a little complex. Let's think about the following pseudo code where we want to update a recursive data structure of type A in place (The code is written in Elm but assume that we implemented it with Perceus.):.

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