Comment by gf000

Yeah, and?

We are in agreement here, C++ is not a GCd language. What I (we) claim is that reference counting is a GC, that's it. A language that uses RC 100% would be a GCd language, like python (okay, it does have a tracing GC to collect cycles as well). C++/rust has the necessary language primitives to express reference counting as a library, but that's an optional thing, usually applied only to select few objects. That's a bit like Java can also just allocate a byte buffer and do manual memory management, neither makes a language GCd/manual in and of itself.