Boost's shared_ptr up to 10× slower than OCaml's garbage collection
Our recent post about the merits of accurate garbage collection over reference counting prompted Tezka to ask for measurements demonstrating the performance differences between an accurate GC and the reference counted shared_ptr smart pointers provided by the Boost C++ library. The benchmarks we have been using to prototype allocators for our HLVM project provide the perfect setting for such an experiment. We already have C++ code that solves the n -queens problem using logic programming with a variety of different allocation strategies. Adding another version of our benchmark using Boost's shared_ptr gave the following remarkable results: These new results highlight just how slow reference counting can be. The C++ code using Boost's reference counted smart pointers is running up to 10× slower than OCaml! Note also the new "stack" section that is the first C++ to beat OCaml, albeit cheating by exploiting the fact that this implementation of this benchmark always hap...