[barrkel]

It can be done. In fact something very close to that is done in the Delphi compiler.

Delphi has a variety of reference counted types. Originally just strings, but later dynamic arrays and COM-style interfaces, all use automatic reference counting. Assignment and copying of these types are done via runtime calls, not just for variables of these types, but also structures and static arrays, recursively, that contain these types.

When allocating locals of these types, and of types that contain these types, the compiler also writes out an RTTI structure describing the stack layout, a bit like the activation record was an actual Pascal record. This RTTI is used to correctly decrement references when the stack is popped in normal case, or during exception unwinding.

The RTTI scheme is smart enough to encode several variables of the same type as being like a static array of that type, etc.

All this doesn't help with liveness, of course, which will still be a problem for the code presented in the article. In fact the efficiency of the encoding is in direct opposition to liveness; encoding things as contiguous blocks of pointers will most likely artificially extend their lifetime to the whole call frame.