Minimizing reference count updating with deferred and anchored pointers for functional data structures

Reference counting can be an attractive form of dynamic storage management. It recovers storage promptly and (with a garbage stack instead of a free list) it can be made "real-time"—i.e., all accesses can be performed in constant time. Its major drawbacks are its inability to reclaim cycles, its count storage, and its count update overhead. Update overhead is especially irritating for functional (read-only) data where updates may dirty pristine cache lines and pages.

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