[pkolaczk]

Well, even though I'm totally for using a modern GC when I can, implementing an efficient GC (low pause, high throughput) requires a lot of effort and special hardware. This is still not available for a number of platforms, particularly the tiny ones, where you may only dream of things like memory virtualization. Also, reference counting may not be as bad as you think when objects are never shared between threads and when you have a smart compiler that can elide most of redundant increments/decrements.