Essay: Use of Reference Counting for Memory Management

Sample Essay

Semiautomatic memory management techniques include reference counting and pooling. Reference counting does need the coder’s support but coder will not have to remind the program when the object cease to be used. Every data structure has a field that contains whole list of active references. On function call reference count is raised by the number of locations being added to the storage. After the execution of function the reference count decreases in a similar manner. Count is checked for zeros as well before freeing the space for work. Unlike the normal memory management techniques, it does not need to follow the entire path in a program that may be followed by that data structure (Chappel, 1997).

Local references automatically check and update the number of references by increasing or decreasing the actual figure. Reference counting should always incorporate increase or decrease in count appropriately. Circular references deadlocks this mechanism. Programmer must make sure not to delete the data structure himself by mistake. Remote objects must care about efficiency that if functions AddRef and Release are called repeatedly then repeated update of reference count variable would add to traffic (Chappel, 1997).

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