[rayiner]

> This is my problem with GC. I like simplicity. Simplicity tends to perform well, and being simple also means it has little space for problems. Refcounting is simple and elegant,

Reference counting isn't conceptually any more simple than garbage collection (you still have to indicate how the underlying alloc() and free() operations are implemented). Further, a proper high performance reference counting system isn't any simpler than a high performance GC. In a multithreaded system you have to keep the reference counts in sync without doing a slow atomic operation every time a pointer is passed around, and you need to back the ref counting system with a high performance malloc()/free() that can handle multithreaded allocation and is resistant to memory fragmentation.