[theseoafs]

It's well-known that you can incrementally free objects that are known to be garbage but it's not usually implemented for reference counting since it's not typically seen as a good fit because it undermines the advantages of reference counting a bit: now, objects aren't freed deterministically when they become garbage (that is objects are destroyed at unpredictable times) and you're now introducing unpredictable pauses into the language runtime to free garbage objects (short though those pauses may be). Maintaining the free stack also adds overhead. It's just not a very good fit.

[TheLoneWolfling]

You cannot have both deterministically-freeing GC and GC without arbitrarily-long pauses. That's kind of a given.