I don't see a straw man in the GP comment. He was clearly comparing tracing GC vs refcounting, while you're conflating memory management with value semantics. S

I don't see a straw man in the GP comment. He was clearly comparing tracing GC vs refcounting, while you're conflating memory management with value semantics. Specifically, you're assigning the benefits of value semantics to the absence of a GC and vice versa. While GC'd languages more frequently omit value semantics, they're orthogonal and there are languages (e.g., Go) that profit from both a GC and value semantics.