Comment by seanmcdirmid

I'm not anti-GC, I just think that reference counting is appropriate for UI code. .NET still supports GC, and the collector is very good compared to our competitors; I'm not saying we should give that up!

I should have mentioned that the primary reason WinRT seems to use reference counting is for interop reasons: its much easier to great a UI toolkit that is programmable in both C# and C++. Note that WPF never had a C++ interface, while WinRT has one without the need for any bridge code.

Reference counting has some interesting applications where it is more appropriate trace-based GC. Heck, sometimes we want old-fashioned arenas (Pascal!), it would be nice if our languages could give us some choices.

Manual memory management is annoying but sometimes necessary. I can see why native programmers don't want to give it up as it constitutes the primary performance difference these days between native and managed languages.