IDK about Java, but the GC characteristics of Go seem pretty ideal for UI code. I think they're at sub-1ms pauses on multi-GB heaps now. So even if you want t

IDK about Java, but the GC characteristics of Go seem pretty ideal for UI code. I think they're at sub-1ms pauses on multi-GB heaps now. So even if you want to run at 100 fps it shouldn't be a big obstacle to making frame rate. Of course there's a throughput trade off, but same thing with reference counting. Although I guess it doesn't matter much since the library ecosystem isn't there. I think it would have been an interesting choice for Flutter instead of Dart though. For just memory management, I don't see the downside of GC (vs reference counting) if the latency is good enough. Sure you can still leak memory by maintaining references but at least it deals with cycles (and it's one less thing that any dependencies can screw up). If GC latency is OK, the only remaining advantage of reference counting I can think of is the deterministic destruction of non-memory resources like file handles etc.