Comment by tsimionescu

> As I’ve stated repeatedly, RC is super cheap. Seriously. You can do about several billion of them per second. Your malloc/free call is going to be more expensive.

But that's the whole point. Tracing GC doesn't do malloc/free, and that's where the performance advantages come from. Instead of a complex allocator that has to do lots of work on every free() as well, you get a bump-pointer allocator and move some complexity over to the tracing thread.

And this is especially true if you tend to have large linked data structures.