[Arnavion]

>Garbage collection generally refers to more complex systems that periodically identify and free unused objects in a less deterministic manner.

No, this is a subset of garbage collection called tracing garbage collection. "Garbage collection" absolutely includes refcounting.

[simonask]

There’s just no good reason to conflate the two. Rust’s Arc and C++’s std::shared_ptr do not reclaim reference cycles, so you can call it “garbage collection” if you want, but the colloquial understanding is way more useful.

[pjmlp]

The coloquial term is like people arguing about coaching a footbal team without making it into the field.

Chapter 5, https://gchandbook.org/contents.html

Other CS quality references can be provided with similar table of contents.