> Android uses garbage collection. iOS uses ref-counting. I hope you meant to say "Dart uses GC, Swift uses ref-counting". > On a mobile platform, IMHO ref-co

> Android uses garbage collection. iOS uses ref-counting. I hope you meant to say "Dart uses GC, Swift uses ref-counting". > On a mobile platform, IMHO ref-counting is clearly superior and is a competitive avantage for iOS. Reference counting can also cause pauses since decrementing a single reference can cause a arbitrarily large set of objects to be simultaneously deallocated. Dart's GC performs memory compaction and allocations are performed by bumping a pointer in the new space. Swift's allocations are much slower since they comb a free-list and it has no facility for compaction.