[tonyg]

> It confuses folks into thinking that there is some garbage collection that isn’t tracing. There’s no such thing.

It is standard to consider reference counting as garbage collection.

Bacon, D.F., Cheng, P. and Rajan, V.T. 2004. A unified theory of garbage collection. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 39, 10 (Oct. 2004), 50–68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1035292.1028982

Abstract:

Tracing and reference counting are uniformly viewed as being fundamentally different approaches to garbage collection that possess very distinct performance properties. [...] Using this framework, we show that all high-performance collectors (for example, deferred reference counting and generational collection) are in fact hybrids of tracing and reference counting.