On Reference Counting

Reference counting is one of those nasty little things that always seems easy and straightforward before you do it and for which you always curse yourself afterward. There is often little choice (so don't curse yourself too much) because in many circumstances it's the lesser of two evils. The other evil is full blown garbage collection - arghh..! Remember, if there's a good way to restructure your code to eliminate the need for ref-counting or garbage collection, DO IT!

I have code that I use whenever I decide to ref-count that allows me to monitor object lifetimes, object ages and so forth to easily debug ref-counting issues. It requires extra memory and so is not suitable in every case. Alternatively, I've simply logged object creation and deletion to a file and then written a separate program to read the log to locate the offending objects and the general regions of code responsible for creating and (not) deleting them.

But don't ever assume that ref-counting bugs will be easily fixed. Usually once you fix one symptom another one pops up somewhere completely removed from the first. Both are probably unrelated to the source of the problem. This is what makes ref-counting insidious. So take my advice, when implementing ref-counting, do your due diligence upfront and make sure every increment and decrement is accounted for. You'll be sorry if you don't.