On: The Path to Rust

[anp]

How does reference counting pause? There's no stop-the-world GC action, as the garbage collection is amortized over every object deallocating itself.

[cmrdporcupine → anp]

That's not entirely true, if your decrement results in a cascading free of an entire tree of objects you will pay for the deallocation time for that entire tree -- decrement, free, decrement children, free, etc..

And unless your RC algorithm is more clever than most that's going to be stop-the-world.

[TheHydroImpulse → cmrdporcupine]

Rc is scoped to a single thread, so it'll be, at worst, stop-the-thread.