> Garbage Collection involves crawling live objects from roots to determine what's still alive. > If you're not doing that, you might still be doing automatic

> Garbage Collection involves crawling live objects from roots to determine what's still alive. > If you're not doing that, you might still be doing automatic memory management, but you're not doing GC. Whether GC and automatic memory management are [significantly] different terms depends on who you ask, I don't think there is a consensus on that. In many cases however people tend to say GC as shorthand for tracing GC. I think in many cases we see ARC is "good enough", and in a JIT scenario you could remove many RC changes by effectively collapsing/merging scopes. OTOH it is quite clear that for the same workload tracing inevitably performs better.