[kevinossia]

Sure you can. C++ has reference-counted garbage collection with its smart pointers and RAII, just like Swift. People certainly write high-throughput systems in C++.

Swift is slower than C++, yes, but not because of its memory management scheme.

[pkulak]

Unless you go absolutely ham with smart pointers (which everyone knows not to do if you care about performance), C++ isn’t really a reference counting language.

I wouldn’t call RAII “reference counting”. I mean, I guess, but it’s the programmer or the compiler doing it. I’m talking about runtime reference counting.