[sshine]

Reference counting is a form of GC. Saying Swift, or Perl, are not GC’ed would be misleading.

In Rust, reference counting is opt-in for individual objects. It is a necessity for any powerful, low-level language to be able to implement any high-level feature.

You can, after all, also implement reference counting in C.

To avoid GC, you need a language where it’s opt-in. For example C++ or Zig, but not OCaml.