[joewillsher]

Does saying 'ARC' not work for you? :)

And the Swift runtime is pretty minimal, mostly used for storing dynamic type information, dispatching protocol methods, generating (unspecialised) generic types, checking conformances etc. It's mostly used by the compiler to add the dynamic features of the language; for example, the compiler observes the lifetimes of variables and inserts retain/release instructions, which are lowered down to a swift_retain or swift_release calls on the runtime instance. These functions are implemented in the runtime and do the manipulation of reference counts and deallocation.

[Someone]

It is simpler than a full GC, but I would not call that "pretty minimal". In particular, weak and unowned references and the guarantee that referencing them after the object they referred to was deallocated crashes your program make swift_release nontrivial.

[chc]

I can see how you'd say that's minimal compared to languages with really huge runtimes — but do you really think it's minimal compared to C or Rust?