From: Kevin Lewis Date: October 6 2008 7:26pm Subject: Re: Understanding RefCounts in Falcon List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/falcon/19 Message-Id: <48EA6666.6010606@sun.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT >> Kevin Lewis wrote; >> The advantage of targeted reference counting is performance. >> The advantage of smart pointers is stability. > On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Vladislav Vaintroub wrote: > I'm about to give up. All discussions during Boston meeting are in vain. > References are non-existent feature of C++ and it is not possible to prevent > copying and object when it is passed as function parameter. Therefore smart > pointers are slow. Vlad, your sarcasm may have been misunderstood. C++ does support passing references and this can be done to smart pointers without causing an interlocked increment between functions. But I was talking about multiple copies of pointers within functions and using them for some duration of time, even in sub-functions. Targeted reference counting can reduce interlocked increments even if passing pointers by reference. Do you think this is negligible or can be worked around somehow?