Comment by pizlonator

You’re not going to convince me by citing that paper, as it’s controversial in GC circles. It’s more of a spicy opinion piece than a true story.

I agree that RC and GC are both kinds of automatic memory management.

RC’s semantics aren’t about tracking deadness. That’s the disconnect. In practice, when someone says, “I’m using RC”, they mean that they have destructors invoked on count reaching zero, which then may or may not cause other counts to reach zero. If you squint, this does look like a trace - but by that logic everyone writing recursive traversals of data structures is writing a garbage collector