Comment by pizlonator

Yeah!

Also, the closest thing to a graph search in reference counting, as most of us understand it, occurs at a totally different level in the stack.

In a GC: the graph search is hidden from view and implemented in any number of clever ways by the language runtime. Or, if you’re implementing the GC yourself, it sits out of the way of normal operations on your “heap”.

In ref counting: down ref to zero triggers a destructor. That destructor can do anything. It so happens that if the type has reference counted references, then the destructor will, either automatically or manually, invoke downref operations. All of this is part of the language’s normal execution semantics.

To say that these things are alike is a stretch. You could use similar logic to say that anyone doing a graph search is collecting garbage