[eru]

You don't.

You'd avoid creating circular structures as much as possible. You can get pretty far that way.

[schumihan]

It's very difficult to avoid it when thing goes complicating. A may reference B, B may reference C, ... and somewhere, X may reference back to A. If this strategy makes sense for big project, many hackers work with C++ can use it either, as the performance overhead is very low.

But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage.

[eru]

> But in the real world, reference-count based GC just has limited usage.

And in theory it doesn't fare much better. Proper garbage collection can have better performance, and does the Right Thing.