> The problem is that "garbage collection" as a term seems to have become synonymous with "tracing GC" The term has been used that way since I first heard it b

> The problem is that "garbage collection" as a term seems to have become synonymous with "tracing GC" The term has been used that way since I first heard it back in the '80s, so it's probably not a battle worth fighting at this point. Yes, of course, there's a formal sense under which reference counting is just an outlying position within the broader world of garbage collection, but from an engineering point of view, it's a significantly different set of tradeoffs, and reference counting doesn't really qualify as the same thing when you're deciding how to structure your program.