> His contention is that languages with GC don't require reference count updates, and so manipulating the BDD graph is much cheaper in these languages since the

> His contention is that languages with GC don't require reference count updates, and so manipulating the BDD graph is much cheaper in these languages since the resource accounting overhead is deferred by some non-deterministic time. To be clear, the "contention" is the well-known problem that reference counting (especially atomic reference counting) is one of the most expensive automatic memory management techniques in existence, and it takes pretty significant efforts to get it on par with a modern tracing collector. That's because reference counting has high overhead and poor cache locality (as it comes with a built-in pointer chasing requirement even when you assign a reference). That the cost is deferred has nothing to do with it.