[TheNorthman]

I was sort of vaguely aware of this but thank you for pointing it out! I think the point still stands, and that reference counting like this is just a different kind of garbage collection.

[frigid]

It certainly adds (some, not many thanks to static analysis) runtime checks, but it's also fairly distinguished from typical tracing garbage collection by being deterministic. I believe ARC/ORC also works with a shared heap via "isolated" data.

[hayley-patton]

That's correct; there are two chapters of the GC Handbook on reference counting, and ye olde unified theory of garbage collection <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1028976.1028982>.

[planetis]

It's not exactly like that there is cursor inference and copy elision. But ok...