Comment by moregrist

> it's simply a less general (we could legitimately say lesser) garbage collection that doesn't deal with cycles on its own.

There are different implementation and performance trade-offs associated with both. I’ll focus on the two that are most meaningful to me.

Reference counting can be added as a library to languages that don’t want or can’t have a precise garbage collector. If you work in C++ (or Rust), it’s a very viable way to assure that you have some measure of non-manual clean up while maintaining precise resource control.

Similarly, when performance matters reference counting is essentially deterministic much easier to understand and model.

In a lot of situations, garbage collection is an overall better strategy, but it’s not a strict superset, and not always the right choice.